A quasi-experimental evaluation of an on-line formative assessment and tutoring system

ASSISTments is a web-based math tutor designed to address the need for timely student assessment while simultaneously providing instruction, thereby avoiding lost instruction time that typically occurs during assessment. This article presents a quasi-experiment that evaluates whether ASSISTments use has an effect on improving middle school students’ year-end test scores. The data was collected from 1240 seventh graders in three treatment schools and one comparison school. Post-test (7th grade year-end test) results indicate, after adjusting for the pre-test (6th grade year-end test), that students in the treatment schools significantly outperformed students in the comparison school and the difference was especially present for special education students. A usage analysis reveals that greater student use of ASSISTments is associated with greater learning consistent with the hypothesis that it is useful as a tutoring system. We also found evidence consistent with the hypothesis that teachers adapt their whole class instruction based on overall *This research was funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences (Grant #R305K030140 and Grant #R305A07044).