This project is the brainchild of Neil and Cristina Heffernan. In 1994, the two met teaching middle school math in Baltimore City. Cristina was a returning Peace Corps volunteer and Neil was a Teach for America teacher. Both strived to give their students feedback as efficiently and effectively as possible, but both knew that it was impossible to provide feedback on homework until the next day in class, and that it was very time consuming to give individualized, one-on-one feedback. Neil knew from earning an undergraduate degree in computer science that automation might be a useful solution. Neil returned to school, earning a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon with an emphasis on creating educational tools that deliver immediate feedback. Since 2005, Neil has earned over 15 million dollars in funding to conduct research on the role of feedback, with Cristina as his partner in business, research, and life. Their work has shown that teachers can double student's learning by using ASSISTments for homework. Now, because Neil is also a huge fan of Open Educational Resources, he has proudly extended the system to allow Engage New York resources to work smoothly with Google Classroom.
He is pleased that any Google Classroom teacher can assign EngageNY problems into the stream. Students access their assignments using their stream and receive immediate feedback on their work while teachers can easily access actionable data to drive their in-class review and instruction. Teachers can also push students' grades up to Google Classroom for easy reference.
Neil and Cristina have built this tool with the help of over 100 students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and by using the feedback from hundreds of teachers. Neil tirelessly continues to conduct research on the role of feedback. Find out more at http://www.neilheffernan.net/.
You must have a Google Classroom account in order to use the features on this site.
You begin by finding a problem set, exit ticket, or classwork item from the grade, module, and lesson they are using in EngageNY. Then, under the "View link", teachers can select the problems they want to assign. Once selected, the problems can be assigned by clicking on the "Assign link" at the top of the page. This will put the assignment in the stream.
The Assignment link in the student's stream brings them to the math problems where they can solve the problems and enter their answers. They immediately find out if their answers were right or wrong. If their answer was wrong, they will be able to try again until they reach the correct solution or request the answer to continue with the assignment. A grade will be calculated for each student based on how many attempts they made and whether they had to see the answer in order to finish.
The Assignment link in the teacher's stream brings them to the report where they can access detailed information on each student's performance. The video below describes the report in detail. These grades can also be placed into Google Classroom by clicking on "Update Gradebook" from the report.
Once the link is in your stream students click on the link and do the assignment. As a teacher you click on the link and have access to a report on every problem assigned, how well each student performed on the problem and at the top of the report you can see common wrong answers for those problems where many students made the same mistake.
EngageNY was a product that the NY State Department of Education funds the GreatMinds to create this great free curriculums. Specifically, it is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. Read the exact terms of that and if you copy these materials, you must give attribution to EngageNY and GreatMinds.
Since this is Non Commercial, you can not attempt to sell any of these materials. If you want to use these Materials in a commercial way, you need to contact the GreatMinds company that can arrange a license for you.
Every problem inside ASSISTments is labeled as EngageNY. If you copy any of those materials, you need to make you also give them access to this license.