Revisions to the ASSISTments Digital Learning Platform to Expand Its Support for Rigorous Education Research

The team will build new software to create the E-TRIAL-OER Infrastructure to allow experiments to be run in OER content. The software will allow for student-level randomization. First, the team will create the Dependent Measure (DM) Infrastructure that will give researchers a clean metric allowing them to assess student learning. Second, the team will create a Best-So-Far-Students-Support (BSF-SS) Infrastructure that will run experiments at scale. Third, the team will create the Open Science Data Reporting (OSDR) Infrastructure that will give reports to researchers on whether their idea led to better students learning and will do so in a way that is consistent with IES's Standards for Excellence in Education Research (SEER) that include standards like preregistration, open data, and open materials. Five research teams will trial run this infrastructure to test for usability and feasibility of the E-TRIALS-OER Infrastructure.

The new software infrastructure, E-TRIALS-OER Infrastructure will operate inside of ASSISTments digital platform and will support research that is exploratory and experimental. For exploratory work the team will make public all sorts of clickstream data for researchers. For the experimental work the team will support the running of randomized control experiments.