At Carnegie Mellon University, Aleven's research focuses on intelligent tutoring systems and educational games.
[8] Aleven has mentored many prestigious postdocs and PhD students, including Amy Ogan, Ryan S. Baker, Matthew Easterday, Martina Rau, and Ido Roll.
His research investigated whether self-explanation through Cognitive Tutor could improve student performance in school more than conventional methods.
[10] Enhancing MOOCs with ITS Aleven, along with his colleagues Jonathan Sewall, Ryan Baker, Yuan Wang, and Octav Popescu introduced intelligent tutoring systems(ITS) into massive open online courses (MOOCs) to enhance learning-by-doing and overall student performance.
The ITSs support learning-by-doing to assist students by guiding them through complex practice problems and having them explain their work.
In 2016, Aleven, along with his colleagues McLaughlin, Glenn, and Koedinger, examined how the effectiveness of digital tutors can be increased by adapting to the unique differences between learners, as well as to the similarities between them, such as common hurdles to solving a problem.