Artificial intelligence may help address one of the biggest challenges in education: Ensuring English learners’ literacy skills can keep pace with their native speaking peers.
Only about a third of English learners read at least at a “basic” level in language arts by 4th grade, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card, compared to two-thirds of 4th graders overall.
The problem is there simply isn’t enough high-quality research to figure out how to harness AI tools as effectively as possible for those students, who make up at least 10 percent of the public school population.
Enter the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education.
The agency this fall provided Digital Promise, a nonprofit organization that works on equity and technology issues in schools, and its partners about $10 million for a five-year project to create a new research and development hub charged with figuring out how the technology might be used to improve English learners’ literacy skills at the elementary level.
The nonprofit will work with schools in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Texas, as well as MRDC, a nonprofit research organization, and the University of Pennsylvania. The project will build on an existing AI-powered literacy platform, Amira Learning, which is used by more than a million students annually.
Jeremy Roschelle, the executive director of learning sciences research at Digital Promise and a principal investigator for the project, said the team will begin by collecting data on English learners’ common challenges in learning to read before working to tailor AI-driven literacy tools to support them.
“That ability to focus on a real equity challenge is really exciting to me, and it’s where some of the [focus] of AI should go,” Roschelle said. “Too often, [vendors say], ‘we’re gonna adapt. We’re gonna personalize.’ But the reality is they usually can’t get the data they need” to understand particular populations of students well enough to do that.
The project will begin to tackle that challenge.
Many schools are already using AI tools to help English learners
As it is, one-third of school and district administrators say they are already using artificial intelligence technologies in programs serving multilingual learners, according to a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey of 1,135 educators conducted in September and October. Another 40 percent said they’re either “considering,” “exploring,” or “piloting” these tools.
Boosting literacy outcomes for English learners isn’t the only area where IES sees the potential for AI to improve teaching and learning.
The agency has financed three similar research and development hubs. Two will support improving science, math, technology, and engineering education and the third will support early literacy.
“These new centers will design and scale [generative AI] tools that support student learning while enabling well-trained educators to do what they do best: ensuring every learner reaches their fullest potential,” said Matthew Soldner, IES acting director, in a statement.
