Scaling Teachers’ Professional Development for ASSISTments

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the ASSISTments (an online math work tool that supports teachers and students with feedback and performance reports) approach in a variety of settings, including high-need rural populations. The intervention consisted of a virtual professional learning community (vPLC) for participating teachers and access to the ASSISTments platform for those teachers and their students. The students used ASSISTments to complete pre-built problems (generally, from their OER curricula) assigned by their teachers and received immediate feedback. The teachers reviewed reports of student work to inform their instruction. The vPLC met 8 times over Zoom for 75 minutes each time and had an online Slack channel for asynchronous discussion.<br>We studied the effects of the intervention by conducting a large-scale school-level QED study to test the efficacy of ASSISTments on teachers’ classroom practices and students’ learning outcomes. <br><br>RQ1: Do participating schools implement vPLC-augmented ASSISTments as intended by the developer? How much usage occurs? To what extent is each feature used?<br>RQ2: What is the effect of vPLC-augmented ASSISTments on the math achievement of middle school students (grades 6–8) compared with the math achievement of the middle school students in the comparison group? <br>RQ3: Do the effects of vPLC-augmented ASSISTments vary for students with different prior achievement and for students with other policy-relevant characteristics (such as rural versus nonrural)?<br>RQ4: What effects do implementation variation have on student learning?<br>RQ5: How is the implementation of the vPLC-augmented ASSISTments intervention associated with teachers’ use of data to inform and adjust instructional practices? How is teachers’ use of data associated with the effects of the intervention on student learning?<br>RQ6: How is the use of the ASSISTments platform by individual students and at the class level associated with student learning? <br><br>Data was collected from two consecutive cohorts of schools. Cohort 1 schools participated in the experiment during the 2022-23 school year, and Cohort 2 schools participated in the experiment during the 2023-24 school year.