Carnegie Mellon University
Principal Investigator: Kenneth Koedinger
Using Web-Based Cognitive Assessment Systems for Predicting Student Performance on State Exams

Given the limited classroom time available in middle school mathematics classes, teachers are compelled to choose between time spent assisting students' development and time spent assessing students' abilities. To help resolve this dilemma, this team of researchers plans to integrate assistance and assessment by utilizing a web-based system ("Assistment") that will offer instruction to students while providing a more detailed evaluation of their abilities to the teacher than is possible under current approaches. Students will work on the Assistment website for about 20 minutes per week. The Assistment system is an artificial intelligence program. Each week when students work on the website, the system "learns" more about the students' abilities and provides increasingly accurate predictions of how they will do on a standardized mathematics test. The system also identifies the difficulties individual students – and the class as a whole – are having. Teachers will be able to use this detailed feedback to tailor their instruction to focus on the particular difficulties identified by the system. Unlike other assessment systems, the Assistment technology also provides students with intelligent tutoring assistance while the assessment information is being collected.