Opinion
Artificial Intelligence Opinion

AI Can Make Education More Personal (Yes, Really)

Frequent, trustworthy feedback to teachers helps them interact more with students
By Jing Liu, Dora Demszky & Heather C. Hill — August 14, 2023 5 min read
Digital illustration of a teacher and students learning about artificial intelligence inside of a digital virtual environment.
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

With technological breakthroughs in generative AI happening at unparalleled speed, it’s useful to remember the social nature of education and the consequent importance of teachers.

The free exchange of ideas through small-group work, the laughter that takes place naturally in the classroom, the curious eyes, and the raised hands—all reflect human learning. When the social elements are missing or compromised, as they were during COVID-19 school building closures, it is challenging for schools to help students engage and learn.

Both research and experience tell us that in most times and places, education has been a social and interpersonal process. And teachers are the most fundamental element of that process. To put it simply, teachers are irreplaceable, even in the age of wondrous chatbots.

So rather than forcing one more digital tool into teachers’ already busy schedules, what if we harness the power of AI to support them and simultaneously honor their central position in education?

At a time when teachers are being burnt out, new AI tools need to help teachers free up their time and foster meaningful relationships with students. To that end, one area where AI has tremendous potential is teacher professional development. While teachers today receive many different forms of feedback on their instruction, not all feedback is equally useful. In particular, research suggests that teachers appreciate and need feedback that is nonthreatening, timely, and trustworthy.

Different from evaluative feedback, this kind of feedback aims to modify teachers’ thinking or behavior to improve their teaching. For example, do teachers ask open-ended questions that elicit students’ higher-order thinking? Do teachers effectively engage students from all backgrounds and not just some? Teachers need feedback opportunities on these and other topics to reflect upon their strengths as well as areas needing improvement.

Providing teachers with high-quality formative feedback is not easy, however. Training raters and paying them to visit classrooms is extremely time consuming and resource-intensive. In practice, principals, who are already time-strapped, often have to step in and do classroom walk-throughs. But principals tend to be too generous in commenting on a teacher’s instruction, failing to provide the necessary information for teachers to make meaningful improvement.

The feedback could range from something simple like student-teacher talk ratio to complex teaching strategies like how often the teacher takes up student ideas.

These factors all perpetuate the status quo. On average, teachers in U.S. public schools receive feedback from their coaches and principals only once or twice a year, a frequency too low to support teachers’ professional growth.

Imagine a world where we could harness the power of AI to provide teachers with automated, valuable feedback. A teacher finishing a lesson would upload an audio recording to secured cloud storage. An AI algorithm would quickly analyze the audio and give teachers insights into their teaching. The feedback could range from something simple like student-teacher talk ratio to complex teaching strategies like how often the teacher takes up student ideas. Teachers can choose how often they want this feedback to allow for immediate adjustment and continual improvement.

This brand-new feedback loop is what our team, a group of scholars with expertise in education, linguistics, economics, and computer science, envisioned when we designed our AI-powered feedback tool. We call this tool M-Powering Teachers (M stands for machine).

As the name suggests, M-Powering Teachers leverages natural-language processing, a branch of AI that uses computers to interpret human language and can analyze the verbal aspect of classroom instruction and then deliver formative feedback to teachers. Because the entire process requires little human input, it has the potential to significantly reduce costs and increase the frequency of feedback cycles.

A common issue for many technology-based tools is that there is rarely rigorous evidence to show their claimed benefits. This is not the case for M-Powering Teachers. During the past two years, we tested the effectiveness of M-Powering Teachers in two distinct online teaching settings using randomized-controlled trials, the gold standard for testing cause-and-effect relationships. To make it possible to compare the findings, we focused on delivering feedback on one particular teaching practice in both studies—teachers’ uptake of student ideas. We find remarkably consistent results across the two studies.

See Also

Photo collage of tablet computer and teacher instructing class.
F. Sheehan for Education Week / Getty

In an online computer science course offered by Stanford University, instructors who were induced by an email reminder to interact with the feedback improved their frequency of taking up student ideas by 13 percent compared with the control group. Similarly, in an online, one-on-one tutoring program that aims to improve high school students’ research skills, tutors who were offered automated feedback improved their uptake of student contributions by 10 percent compared with the rest of the tutors who didn’t have access to the feedback. Our analyses also suggest that students taught by instructors or tutors who accessed the feedback more frequently had more favorable perceptions of their learning experience in both contexts compared with instructors or tutors who had no or less engagement with the feedback.

While college online courses and one-on-one tutoring are certainly different from K-12 classrooms, these two studies serve as proof of concept for automated feedback and highlight the promise of our approach. In partnership with TeachFX, our team has just finished a third study with 100 mathematics teachers in Utah to evaluate to what extent the findings of the above two studies might generalize to K-12 teachers.

In the M-Powering Teachers approach, teachers are more in control of their own professional development. They can receive on-demand, targeted feedback after each class they teach. They can use such feedback to identify areas for improvement and monitor their own progress. Principals and coaches can then focus their efforts on helping teachers make sense of the information provided and identifying strategies for improvement.

As we move toward a future where AI will have a powerful impact on teaching and learning, let’s not forget education’s interpersonal nature. AI, when used well, would not replace teachers but rather empower them to build stronger relationships with their students. As we now know, those stronger relationships are likely to translate into better classroom experiences and improved learning.

Related Tags:

A version of this article appeared in the August 30, 2023 edition of Education Week as AI Can Make Education More Personal (Yes, Really)

Events

This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
School & District Management Webinar
Harnessing AI to Address Chronic Absenteeism in Schools
Learn how AI can help your district improve student attendance and boost academic outcomes.
Content provided by Panorama Education
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Science Webinar
Spark Minds, Reignite Students & Teachers: STEM’s Role in Supporting Presence and Engagement
Is your district struggling with chronic absenteeism? Discover how STEM can reignite students' and teachers' passion for learning.
Content provided by Project Lead The Way
Recruitment & Retention Webinar EdRecruiter 2025 Survey Results: The Outlook for Recruitment and Retention
See exclusive findings from EdWeek’s nationwide survey of K-12 job seekers and district HR professionals on recruitment, retention, and job satisfaction. 

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Artificial Intelligence From Our Research Center Why Schools Need to Wake Up to the Threat of AI 'Deepfakes' and Bullying
Schools are underprepared to deal with a deluge of AI-created videos that harm the reputations of students and educators.
11 min read
Custom illustration by Stuart Briers showing two identical male figures sitting in a chair with a computer dot matrix pointing to different parts of the body. The background depicts soundwaves, a play button, speaker icon, eye, and ear.
Stuart Briers for Education Week
Artificial Intelligence From Our Research Center AI Has Taken Classrooms by Storm. School Operations Could Be Next
Generative AI tools could help schools with operational tasks like budgeting, transportation, data analysis, and even zoning.
7 min read
Custom illustration by Stuart Briers showing a wrench that is filled with a blue abstract tech image of lines and dots, adjusting a cracked yellow school building. The light blue background reveals a subtle clock image.
Stuart Briers for Education Week
Artificial Intelligence From Our Research Center Will AI Transform Standardized Testing?
AI has the potential to help usher in a new, deeper breed of state standardized tests, but there are plenty of reasons for caution.
10 min read
Custom illustration by Stuart Briers showing the silhouette of a female student wearing a backpack and with a tech dot matrix and ruler in the background. There is a speech bubble containing letters in different languages highlighted within a magnifying glass.
Stuart Briers for Education Week
Artificial Intelligence Q&A AI’s Potential in Special Education: A Researcher’s View
A researcher shares ways he's used generative AI tools effectively with special education students. And what not to do.
5 min read
Custom illustration by Stuart Briers showing a finger illuminating a spot on the back of another hand that is illuminating keys on a blue computer keyboard with AI apps floating all around.
Stuart Briers for Education Week