Math performance continues to be an important focus for improve- ment. Many districts adopted educational technology programs to support student learning and teacher instruction. The ASSISTments program provides feedback to students as they solve homework problems and automatically prepares reports for teachers about student performance on daily assignments. During the 2018- 19 and 2019-20 school years, WestEd led a large-scale randomized controlled trial to replicate the effects of ASSISTments in 63 schools in North Carolina in the US. 32 treatment schools implemented ASSISTments in 7th-grade math class- rooms. Recently, we conducted a follow-up analysis to measure the long-term effects of ASSISTments on student performance one year after the intervention, when the students were in 8th grade. The initial results suggested that implement- ing ASSISTments in 7th grade improved students’ performance in 8th grade and minority students benefited more from the intervention.
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Utilizing the CLASS Framework to Develop a Conversational AI Tutor for open-ended problems in ASSISTments
We present a conversational AI tutor (CAIT) for the purpose of aiding students on middle school math problems. CAIT was created utilizing the CLASS framework, and it is an LLM fine-tuned on Vicuna using a conversational dataset created by prompting ChatGPT using problems and explanations in ASSISTments. CAIT is trained to generate scaffolding questions, provide hints, and correct mistakes on math problems. We find that CAIT identifies 60% of correct answers as correct, generates effective sub-problems 33% of the time, and has a positive sentiment 72% of the time, with the remaining 28% of interactions being neutral. This paper discusses the hurdles to further implementation of CAIT into ASSISTments, namely improved accuracy and efficacy of sub-problems, and establishes CAIT as a proof of concept that the CLASS framework can be applied to create an effective mathematics tutorbot.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1903304
- PAR ID:
- 10470443
- Publisher / Repository:
- LAK 2024 (submitted, in review)
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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