Data Sets

Rationale for Sharing Data Sets

Dr. Heffernan and his graduate students believe sharing the datasets they use in publications is an important part of good scientific practice. Data sets are shared as broadly as possible to facilitate replication of their work and collaboration with other researchers.

Protecting Student Privacy

The ASSISTments Foundation and WPI work together to protect ASSISTments' users privacy. When Dr. Heffernan and his students have determined a dataset does not contain personally identifying information, they make the data publicly available. Please review the terms of use that govern the publicly available data before accessing these datasets.

Terms of Use

Dear Colleague,

The WPI Institutional Review Board is overseeing the administration of NSF grant “Adding Research Accounts to the ASSISTments Platform: Helping Researchers Do Randomized Controlled Studies with Thousands of Students.”

WPI’s Institutional Review Board also has an interest in promoting the open sharing of data. Dr Heffernan, with the approval of the WPI IRB, regularly releases large amounts of anonymized data for others to use for their own analyses. Previously released data is from the general use of ASSISTments by teachers and students.

Some of the terms of use are for the protection of human subject data.

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Terms related to looking at anonymized data.

While ASSISTments will give anonymized data to researchers, sometimes it may be possible to link the data that was intended to be anonymized back to individuals. Since student-level data is covered under FERPA, WPI is required to get your written agreement to not share any personally identifiable information. You also agree to not give that data to anyone else.

I agree, as a condition of using ASSISTments data, to the following terms and conditions meant to ensure that student data remains anonymous:

1. I will not use the data to discover personally identifiable information about the individual students in the study.
2. If I discover something that can identify students personally, I will both delete it from my computer, and inform ASSISTments (Neil Heffernan of WPI - nth@wpi.edu) of this immediately. I will work with ASSISTments to take steps to make sure data that is supposed to be anonymous is in fact anonymous.
3. I agree to not give this data to anyone else. I will only use this data for the purpose I provide.
4. I will acknowledge the use of the ASSISTments TestBed in any publications; ASSISTments will acknowledge my role when my data, etc. is made available to the public.
5. My data and algorithms will be made public in my papers I publish. If you do not want to share your source code, then you can not use this data.

Publicly Available Data Sets

Data Sets Not Listed Above