WPI researcher Neil Heffernan has received a grant of nearly $1.5 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a three-year project that will give educators a clearer view of the mathematical misconceptions that trip up math learners.
Heffernan, the William B. Smith Professor of Computer Science and director of the WPI Learning Sciences and Technologies program, will lead a team that will build a dataset illustrating the errors that students make while solving math problems in ASSISTments, a digital math platform developed at WPI for students and teachers.
The goal of the project is to develop a resource that researchers, app developers, and educators can explore with artificial intelligence (AI) tools to understand students’ reasoning and develop interventions.
“The process of identifying students’ misconceptions about math is labor-intensive and time-consuming, but those insights are critical to teachers who are guiding students through math lessons,” says Heffernan, who co-founded ASSISTments with his wife, Cristina Heffernan, a former math teacher. “This project will pull together a large amount of data and structure it in a way that can be used to support math instruction.”
Heffernan is principal investigator (PI) of the project. Co-PIs are Cristina Heffernan, who is co-executive director of the nonprofit ASSISTments Foundation; WPI research scientists Jiayi Zhang and Sarah Miller; and Shashank Sonkar, assistant professor in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Central Florida.
The project is one of five that recently received grants from the NSF and its philanthropic partners to transform K–12 mathematics education.
