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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, we conducted 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. 

Research on non-cognitive factors has shown that persistence in the face of challenges plays an important role in learning. However, recent work on wheel-spinning, a type of unproductive persistence where students spend too much time struggling without achieving mastery of skills, show that not all persistence is uniformly beneficial for learning. For this reason, it becomes increasingly pertinent to identify the key differences between unproductive and productive persistence toward informing interventions in computer-based learning environments. In this study, we use a classification model to distinguish between productive persistence and wheel-spinning in ASSISTments, an online math learning platform. Our results indicate that there are two types of students who wheel-spin: first, students who do not request any hints in at least one problem but request more than one bottom-out hint across any 8 problems in the problem set; second, students who never request two or more bottom out hints across any 8 problems, do not request any hints in at least one problem, but who engage in relatively short delays between solving problems of the same skill. These findings suggest that encouraging students to both engage in spaced practice and use bottom-out hints sparingly is likely helpful for reducing their wheel-spinning and improving learning. These findings also provide insight on when students are struggling and how to make students' persistence more productive.