The Builder

This page is about creating a problem set in our Builder. Follow the instructions to create a problem set that will be included in the E-TRIALS platform for a Problem Varied Study.

Create AN ACCOUNT in ASSISTments

You will use ASSISTments to modify content and build experimental structures. To create an account, please contact etrials@assistments.org.


Find Content TO MODIFY

In ASSISTments, you will find various resources including Skill Builders, Open Education Resource (OER) curricula, and textbook materials.

Skill Builders are mastery learning based assignments that are organized by Common Core State Standard strands. Students must work until they correctly answer 3 consecutive questions. There are more than 300 Skill Builders in ASSISTments. A list of our Skill Builder content with metrics that highlight student performance like overall accuracy, hint usage, and problems to mastery on average is also available at tiny.cc/aproblems. Skill Builders have historically been the most popular approach to creating randomized controlled trials that occur in a single assignment. Within Skill Builders you can create sections to add a pretest or posttest, basic surveys (please contact etrials@assistments.org for IRB and deployment information with respect to adding surveys), design multiple conditions, and even use conditional statements that intelligently route students - great for adaptive studies or work that adds student choice. Studies developed in a Skill Builder are commonly deployed to the full ASSISTments population and are assigned naturalistically by teachers throughout the year. 

All other material, including all OER curricula, can be used to create single or multi-assignment randomized controlled trials but requires use of the Teachers for Research and Feedback network for deployment to ensure modules (pretests, assignments, posttests, etc.) are assigned as intended. If you want to use content from a particular curricula or you have an experimental design that spans multiple days, weeks, or months, please contact etrials@assistments.org to learn more about how to get started.

Create your study

Building Tutorials

To learn how to use the Builder, please reach out to us at etrials@assistments.org. We are happy to provide trainings and resources to individuals and groups. 

Example Studies

On our Example Studies page, we describe four studies that have been developed using the legacy version of ASSISTments: