Hi Carolina, thank you for your question. At the moment students are assigned a learning companion. We have collected data indicating that males prefer the male companion. We are making plans to design additional multi-cultural companions with student input and plan to add functionality that allows students to design aspects of their tutor.

Hi Allison, thank you for your question. The program is tracking all of the things you mentioned, how many problems they got wrong/right, how many hints used, amt of time on problems and it also asks the students directly how are you feeling? It asks how frustrated, interested, bored or excited are you on a scale. The system provides the student an intervention based on what they report on how they are feeling. The student maybe directed to the my student progress page, to a new topic or to review a topic. Please feel free to log in as a guest and try out Mathspring.

Hi Allison, We have been working for several years on creating accurate predictive models of student emotion based on a combination of: a) recent history of student activity (time, hints, correctness); b) baselines of student affective predispositions for math, problem solving and motivational factors such as growth mindset. All of these have shown to be important predictors of student emotion when a student solves a new problem.

Hi Tamara,
We are adding new activities that have other forms of responding as we speak. These involve math problems of the style of PARCC, as well as mini-games and activities that involve more sophisticated narratives and forms of responding.
—Ivon

Dear David,

Thanks for your comments. The target audience for this tutor includes students in grades 4-12. Currently the tutor covers most of the math topics listed in the Common Core Standards in mathematics for Grades 4-8 and we are developing new problems for grades 8-12.

Tens of thousands of students in four states have used the tutor.

The tutor has several response types and numerous responses within each type. It produces hints ( 1-6 hint for each problem); companion comments (2-3 for each effort and emotion level — e.g. comments for a student who has not exerted much effort and comments for a student who appears frustrated); and external activities (linked Internet problems, e.g. from Kahn Academy, that are very similar to the one the student is working on).

The hints and external activities do not become repetitious. However, the Companion comments would become repetitious after a few hours. Students work on the tutor generally for a few hours. They could also work with the tutor for a few hours/week over a semester.

Currently the tree does not fail and wither away. It does stay in the same position if the student failed to make progress.

Students do fail to make progress and their trees do not grow.

Teachers are engaged in the use of the tutor. They select the CC standards to be presented and help students as they work on the tutor.

Regards
Beverly

Hi David,
Actually the tree grows topics out of it! If you use it for a few days with a real account, such as usr: FOWLERSTUDENT and pwd: FOWLERSTUDENT, you will see the different topics growing and eventually blooming. This is a test user, doesn’t really have a lot of activity but you can see how the tree is changing gradually after logins during different days.

We were considering the idea of withering… We wanted to try it for the student progress page. This way you have to “keep your plants growing happily” until they bloom and give … peppers!

Dear Bill,

Nice to talk with you. Yes, we have tested MathSpring with students who have an Individual Education Plan in the classroom, primarily those with learning disabilities. We found that these students show increased confidence and reduced frustration when the companion is used. These student also learn more and are more interested in the tutor than the control group of typical students.

We definitely want to use the tutor with student with sensory and cognitive disabilities.

We are actively looking for teachers of this populations of students to work with us to evaluate the system in their classroom. Are you able to work with us?

Regards
Beverly