2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this paper, we present a framework for quantifying the impact of interventions on the full trajectories of students' experiences. The interventions are given periodically based on student performance forecasting from an artificial intelligence (AI) model. We performed a small-scale randomized controlled trial for evaluating the impact of the AI-based intervention system on the undergraduate students of a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) course. Intervention messaging content was based on machine learning forecasting models trained on data collected from the students in the same course over the preceding 3 years. Trial results show that the intervention produced a statistically significant increase in the proportion of students that achieved a passing grade. By applying the trajectory-analysis framework we find that the intervention impacts the stories of some types of students more than others, and use this to define new ways of identifying students who are most likely to benefit. Together these outcomes point to the potential and promise of just-in-time interventions for STEM learning and the need for larger fully-powered randomized controlled trials.