Finalist
10th Anniversary Global Challenge

ASSISTments

Team Leader
Cristina Heffernan
AI-supported math formative assessment platform helping teachers support all students in achieving grade-level success.
What is the name of your organization?
The ASSISTments Foundation
What is the name of your solution?
ASSISTments
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
AI-supported math formative assessment platform helping teachers support all students in achieving grade-level success.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Worcester, MA, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
There are approximately 24 million students learning math in grades 3–8 in the United States, yet by 8th grade only 28% demonstrate math proficiency on NAEP, a key national indicator of readiness for Algebra I. Millions of students are moving through school without the mathematical foundation needed for high school success, college and career pathways, and long-term economic opportunity. These challenges are most acute in high-poverty schools, and national achievement trends remain stagnant as schools continue to recover from the pandemic. While much of EdTech focuses on remediation outside core instruction, ASSISTments focuses on improving what happens every day during the core math block. In many classrooms, students practice new math on worksheets, make mistakes without knowing, and receive little to no feedback. Teachers often lack real-time visibility into which students are struggling and why, discovering misconceptions only after a unit assessment, when pressure to move forward is already high.
What is your solution?
ASSISTments is an AI-supported math formative assessment platform that helps teachers make better instructional decisions during daily instruction. Teachers assign practice and formative assessments from their curriculum online; students receive immediate feedback, hints, and explanations while they work. Teachers review real-time insights by student, problem, skill, and standard, allowing them to identify misconceptions, monitor understanding, and adjust instruction. Our AI Data Assistant summarizes student performance, suggests small groups, and recommends targeted next steps grounded in the curriculum students are learning. Drawing on classroom performance and patterns from more than a decade of student learning data, ASSISTments helps teachers identify skills students may need to revisit to succeed with grade-level math. It fits teachers’ existing workflows, strengthens curriculum-aligned instruction, and makes evidence-based differentiation easier during everyday classroom practice. The result is a simple but powerful cycle: teachers assign meaningful practice, students receive timely support, and teachers use actionable data to determine what to reteach, where to intervene, and how to move learning forward. Two independent randomized controlled trials found that ASSISTments significantly improves grade-level math achievement within one year. Product demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3HQWTt3-30 Learn about our AI-enabled features: https://tinyurl.com/4yyt9c7a
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
ASSISTments primarily serves students in grades 3–8—70% of whom attend Title I schools—and the math teachers working to support their success. Many of these students are already below grade level in math, putting them at risk of missing future academic milestones. Their teachers are passionate and committed, but often overwhelmed by the demands of implementing a rigorous, grade-level curriculum in under-resourced environments. They struggle to find the time to grade student work, identify misconceptions, and differentiate instruction for dozens of students. ASSISTments helps both students and teachers. By providing feedback, hints, and explanations to students while they practice, we help them learn from mistakes and take greater ownership of their learning. By providing teachers real-time data and AI insights, we help them quickly understand what students know, where they are struggling, and how to adjust instruction, reducing their administrative burden and focusing their time on improving student learning. This year, ASSISTments served more than 2,000 teachers and 125,000 students across all 50 states. Over the next five years, we seek to serve 1.5 million students cumulatively through steady annual growth towards serving 500,000 students a year.
Solution Team:
Cristina Heffernan
Cristina Heffernan
Co-Executive Director
Brian O'Neil
Brian O'Neil
Director of Strategic Partnerships