Brown Bag- Dr. Neil Heffernan
Please join us for the first Brown Bag seminar of the semester. Our first event will be held at the Friday Institute on NC State's Centennial Campus on Wednesday, September 16, in the Collaboratory Commons. Refreshments will be available at 8:30AM and the seminar will begin at 9:00AM. The speaker will be Dr. Neil Heffernan, Associate Professor, in the Department of Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA. His topic is Using Intelligent Tutoring Systems as a Platform for Researching Cognitive Science and Mathematical Education.
In this talk, Dr. Heffernan will discuss using intelligent tutoring systems as a platform for doing cognitive science research. The ASSISTment System is a web-based tutoring system that is used as a formative assessment tool in middle school mathematics. The system was created with support of a number of grants including current NSF funding. This system has five specific elements:
(1) Cognitively diagnostic assessment data that provides teachers with real-time information about specific elements of student learning and misunderstanding,
(2) Mastery learning bookkeeping where students and teachers can easily keep track of the skills students need to master,
(3) Nightly homework where students get immediate feedback and teachers get up to the moment information on student understanding,
(4) Parental notification where parents are given the data and a context to interpret the data in, as well as tips and links to content to help them help their children, and
(5) Clickers on steroids provides teacher to interactively engage with student responses (including extended text responses).
Dr. Heffernan will discuss research (ASSISTments ability to forecast state test scores) and practice (ASSISTments is currently used in a number of schools in Massachusetts) related to the system. Dr. Heffernan is currently working with Dr. Matthew Militello (NCSU Department of Leadership, Policy, and Adult and Higher Education) to implement ASSISTments in schools in a number of states.
After finishing college, Dr. Neil Heffernan taught mathematics to eighth grade students in Baltimore City as part of Teach for America, a program that selectively recruits top candidates to teach in inner-city schools. Deciding to do something easier, he enrolled in Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department to do multi-disciplinary research in cognitive science and computer science, and to create educational software that leads to higher student achievement. For his dissertation, Neil built the first intelligent tutoring system that incorporated a model of tutorial dialog, as well as being one of the first intelligent tutoring systems on the web. This technology was patented and licensed to Carnegie Learning Inc., a company that has sold tutors to 1,000+ high schools across the USA. Neil is working in close collaboration with teachers from the Worcester Public Schools and teachers from the local area to create the next generation of intelligent tutoring systems that are author-able by teachers themselves. With funding from the Office of Naval Research, Neil started by building authoring tools to make it easier for teachers to build and control intelligent tutoring systems. With this tool, he completed ASSISTments for the US Department of Education. ASSISTments is a tool that helps teachers ASSESS students while at the same time presenting them with instructional ASSISTance. ASSISTments usage has doubled every year for 5 years and stands now at roughly 3,000 students using ASSISTments each year as part of their normal math classes. There is a synergy in helping students and producing great research. The ASSISTment System tool has been used to collect data for over three dozen studies on human learning and the rate of that production of knowledge is on the rise. Dr. Heffernan graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College in History and Computer Science in 1993. He received his M.S. (1997) and Ph.D. (2001) in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University. He joined the faculty at WPI in 2002.