Blending Assessment and Instructional Assisting

Middle school mathematics teachers are often forced to choose between assisting students' development and assessing students' abilities because of limited classroom time available. To help teachers make better use of their time, we are integrating assistance and assessment by utilizing a web-based system (“Assistment”) that will offer instruction to students while providing a more detailed evaluation of their abilities to the teacher than is possible under current approaches. An initial version of the Assistment system was created and used last May with about 200 students and 800 students are using it this year once every two weeks. The hypothesis is that Assistments both assist students while also assessing them. This paper describes the Assistment system and some preliminary results.