Service

Support for Research

The following researchers used the E-TRIALS, the ASSISTments infrastructure to run studies that support their research objectives. With the support of funding from an NSF award, Dr. Heffernan was able to help these external researchers run randomized controlled trials within the ASSISTments platform. Please visit our platform for researchers to learn more.

As a public adopter of open science, Dr. Heffernan requires Ph.D. students using ASSISTments data in a paper to provide a link to their data and code (e.g., Python code, or MathLab code). This allows other researchers to build upon their work and fosters a collaborative research culture. There are 23 papers in which academics have used our publicly available datasets for their analysis. Their articles can be found here.

Fyfe, E. (2016) Providing feedback on computer-based algebra homework in middle-school classrooms. Computers in Human Behavior 63. 568-574

Koedinger, K. & McLaughlin, E. (2016) Closing the Loop with Quantitative Cognitive Task Analysis. In Barnes, Chi & Feng (eds) The 9th International Conference on Educational Data Mining. Pp 412-417.

McGuire, P., Tu, S., Logue., M., Mason, C., Ostrow, K. (2017) Counterintuitive effects of online feedback in middle school math: results from a randomized controlled trial in ASSISTments. Educational Media International. 54:3, 231-244, DOI: 10.1080/09523987.2017.1384161

Clinton, V., Walkington, C., & Spark. (2018) The effect of modifying the language of mathematics story problems on problem-solving measures. To be presented at The 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Toronto, Canada.

Hurst, M. A., Cordes, S. (2018) Labelling Common and Uncommon Fractions Across Notation and Education. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2018/papers/0354/0354.pdf

Service to WPI

  • The WPI Outcomes Assessment Committee (3 years)

  • The Computer Science Department: Graduate Research Committee (10 years), Colloquium Committee (2 years, 1 year as chair), Admissions (1 year)

Data Mining Competition

Dr. Heffernan was funded with an NSF BD Spoke grant to engage and educate people on BigData in Education. He ran a competition with his colleagues using ASSISTments data. 75 researchers participated. In addition to giving out awards, Dr. Heffernan and his colleagues hosted a special issue of the Journal on Educational Data Mining for winners to submit results.

Guest Editor

Dr. Heffernan was a guest editor on a special edition of the Journal of Educational Data Mining about the ASSISTments Longitudinal Data Mining Competition.

Baker, R. Heffernan, N. T., & Patikorn, T., (Eds.). (2020) Scientific findings from the ASSISTments longitudinal data mining competition. Journal of Educational Data Mining, 12(2) https://jedm.educationaldatamining.org/index.php/JEDM/issue/view/29

Conference workshops

  • EDM (June 29-July 2, 2021): Reinforcement Learning for Education: Opportunities and Challenges

  • EDM (June 29-July 2, 2021): Causal Inference in Educational Data Mining

  • ACM L@S (June 22-25, 2021): Second Workshop on Educational A/B Testing at Scale

  • LAK (April 12-16, 2021): ELATE: Engineering Learning Analytics Technology Environments: Understanding iteration between data and theory, and design and deployment

  • AAAI (Feb. 2-9, 2021): Program Committee Member of TIPCE 2021 "Imagining Post-COVID Education with AI"

  • NeurIPS (Dec. 6-12, 2020): Minimizing Bias in Machine Learning

  • ACM SIGKDD (Aug. 2020): Tutorial on "Recent Advances in Multimodal Educational Data Mining in K-12 Education"

  • ACM L@S (Aug. 12-14, 2020): Educational A/B Testing at Scale

  • ACM L@S (Aug. 12, 2020): Keynote Speaker for Artificial Intelligence for Video-based Learning at Scale

Journal Reviewing

  • Reviewed for AIED, AERA & EDM (2019).

  • Reviewed for SREE, CHI, AIED, AERA & EDM (2018).

  • Elected to the Executive Committee for the Society for Artificial Intelligence in Education (August 2017).

  • Reviewer for LAK, L@S AIED and CHI 2016-217.

  • Co-Chair of the Program Committee for AIED2015

  • Reviewer for to CHI and CSCW 2015

  • Steering Committee: The Eighth International Conference on Educational Data Mining 2015.

  • Steering Committee: The Seventh International Conference on Educational Data Mining 2014.

  • Program Committee: Intelligent Tutoring Systems Conference 2012.

  • Steering Committee: The Sixth International Conference on Educational Data Mining 2013.

  • Program Committee: Artificial Intelligent in Education Conference 2013.

  • Program Committee: User Modeling And Adaptive Personalization 2013.

  • Steering Committee: The Fifth International Conference on Educational Data Mining 2012.

  • Program Committee: Intelligent Tutoring Systems Conference 2012.

  • Program Committee: Artificial Intelligent in Education Conference 2011.

  • Steering Committee: The Fourth International Conference on Educational Data Mining 2011.

  • Program Committee: User Modeling And Adaptive Personalization 2011.

  • Steering Committee: The Third International Conference on Educational Data Mining 2010.

  • Program Committee: Intelligent Tutoring Systems Conference 2010.

  • Steering Committee: The Second International Conference on Educational Data Mining 2009.

  • Program Committee: The Second International Conference on Educational Data Mining 2009.

  • Program Committee: Artificial Intelligent in Education Conference 2009.

  • Poster Co-Chair for Artificial Intelligent in Education Conference 2009.

  • Program Committee: Intelligent Tutoring Systems Conference 2008.

  • Demonstrations: Intelligent Tutoring Systems Conference 2008.

  • Program Committee: First International Conference on Educational Data Mining 2008.

  • Senior Program Committee: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education 2007.

  • Program Committee: American Association for Artificial Intelligence 2007 (AAAI'07).

  • Co-Chair of “Educational Data Mining Workshop” to be held at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education 2007.

  • Reviewed for IEEE Intelligent Systems Journal. 2007.

  • Reviewer for User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research 2007.

  • Reviewer for Cognitive Science Conference 2007.

  • Program Committee: International Intelligent Tutoring System Conference 2006.

  • Program Committee: FLAIRS-2006 Special Track on Intelligent Tutoring Systems 2006.

  • Program Committee: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education 2005.

  • Workshops Co-Chair International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education 2005.

  • Reviewer for International Intelligent Tutoring System Conference 2004.

  • Chair of workshop on Dialog-Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems: State of the art and new research directions held at the Intelligent Tutoring Systems Conference 2004.

  • Reviewer for International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education 2002.

  • Reviewed for International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning.

  • On the program committee for numerous workshops held in conjunction with AIED and ITS conferences.

National Service

  • Served as an advisor to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), otherwise known as "The Nation's Report Card."

  • Participated in NSF proposal review panels about 10 times.

  • Serves as adviser to the CAST $10 million special education center.

  • Invited to serve on the NSF/CRA CyberLearning Workshop focused on Technology-Enabled Assessment to help shape a research agenda for NSF's EHR Directorate.