Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
A Wright State professor has been awarded a $400,000 grant to work as part of a group with three other universities on using artificial intelligence as a learning tool in classrooms.
Noah L. Schroeder, a professor of educational technology and instructional design at Wright State, said the $400,000 grant will be over five years, and is part of a larger, $20 million grant collaboration with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Temple University and the University of Florida.
The grant says the research will look at how children communicate STEM content, how they learn to persist through challenging work, and how teachers support and promote noncognitive skills, often called soft skills, like persistence.
The overall goal of the project is to find ways to use artificial intelligence to help students who might be struggling with three skills that support learning: persistence, academic resilience and collaboration. Part of the project is building a database of how kids learn, using 96,000 youths across 24 school districts, according to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Eventually, the AI tools can work with teachers in classrooms to support students in developmentally appropriate ways, according to the grant.
“One of the biggest obstacles to AI advances in learning is the lack of shareable datasets for K-12 students,” said Cheng-Xiang Zhai, a computer science professor at Illinois. “We will remedy this by collecting large representative datasets with rich contextual information about learner interactions to enable foundational advances in AI areas, including fair and robust machine learning, natural language processing and socially intelligent agents.”
