Neil T. Heffernan enjoys doing educational data mining and running the ASSISTments system. ASSISTments helps schools teach better. It's a web service hosted at WPI that allows teachers to assign nightly homework or daily class work. Students get instant feedback while teachers get live reports. Professor Heffernan enjoys supervising WPI students in creating ASSISTments content and features. He has 6 dozens paper in educational data mining, and 20+ papers in comparing different ways to optimize student learning.
Professor Heffernan also Directs the Learning Science and Technologies Graduate Program. He is always interested in working with new students in solving these problems, and says ASSISTments has been created by WPI students for the world. Professor Heffernan's goal is to give ASSISTments to millions across the US and internationally as a free service of WPI.
Scholarly Work
News
In the News
The74Million, an online news site focused on education in the U.S., an op-ed by Neil Heffernan, professor of computer science and director of Learning Sciences and Technologies.
U. S. News & World Report reported on a rigorous study by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT that took a hard look at education technology and cited ASSISTments, a free homework platform created by computer science professor Neil Heffernan, as one program that is having a measurable positive impact. “We had the guts to expose ourselves” to randomized control trials, Heffernan said, adding that he now has grants for ongoing work on the program.
