Failure to Disrupt Book Club with Cristina and Neil Heffernan

For TeachLab’s third Failure to Disrupt Book Club episode, Justin Reich reflects on a live conversation with special guests Cristina and Neil Heffernan. They discuss Failure To Disrupt’s Chapter 2: Algorithm-Guided Learning at Scale: Adaptive Tutors, and discuss the success of their tool ASSISTments.

“According to SRI, they thought the reason why it was successful...They were like, "This fit in with what teachers were used to doing." They're used to actually assigning homework, and classwork. They could see before the kids walked in the door, which problems were hard. And so they could do something a little differently. In fact, what they did find is actually teachers didn't go over every item the way they used to. And of course they didn't because all the kids got feedback, but they still went over the stuff that was hard. And particularly in the places where there was common wrong answers because all those kids should be told, "Hey, you weren't all alone." Meaning, actually, you and half of the rest of you all screwed up this problem in the same way. And I think there's a social-emotional component of actually doing that as opposed to just sitting in class and realizing, ‘I got everything wrong’ and not knowing everyone else, or a large number of other kids are in the same boat.”

- Neil Heffernan, Professor/Researcher/Program Director

Show Notes

“According to SRI, they thought the reason why it was successful...They were like, "This fit in with what teachers were used to doing." They're used to actually assigning homework, and classwork. They could see before the kids walked in the door, which problems were hard. And so they could do something a little differently. In fact, what they did find is actually teachers didn't go over every item the way they used to. And of course they didn't because all the kids got feedback, but they still went over the stuff that was hard. And particularly in the places where there was common wrong answers because all those kids should be told, "Hey, you weren't all alone." Meaning, actually, you and half of the rest of you all screwed up this problem in the same way. And I think there's a social-emotional component of actually doing that as opposed to just sitting in class and realizing, ‘I got everything wrong’ and not knowing everyone else, or a large number of other kids are in the same boat.”

- Neil Heffernan, Professor/Researcher/Program Director

In this episode we’ll talk about: