Once the AI Partners are integrated in these classrooms, Whitehill and his team will be able to collect data on how students interact with them, and then iteratively make them more intelligent and effective. Initially, the AI Partner might be controlled by a human teacher in a backroom (Wizard of Oz-style interaction), but over time, it can learn from its human controller what to do when and thereby become more autonomous. Whitehill and his team anticipate that the particular form that the Partner takes is likely also important.

Students might find an embodied robot creepy, but they might like interacting with an animated avatar on a touchscreen, he says.

This project represents a shift in how researchers envision AI in the classroom. While earlier work in this field sought to fully automate the teaching process, which Whitehill considers to be infeasible, this project is about human-AI teaming, and how humans and teachers possess complementary abilities. AI Partners can help to magnify teachers existing strengths by increasing the number of students in the classroom who receive the real-time feedback they need for optimal learning.

Whitehill also says that this research will be greatly informative even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many school districts across the country are participating in remote learning. In fact, he says testing agent-student interactions over platforms like Zoom have certain advantages over in-person interactions.

With Zoom, each student and teacher in the classroom is cleanly separated from each other, and all their audiovisual inputs are channeled through a common software interface. This makes it much easier to analyze their speech, gestures, language, and interactions with each other, Whitehill says. In contrast, in normal, in-person classrooms, the interactions are much messier, since students often sit in all kinds of different positions, might be touching their faces, and work in a noisy environment, which makes it more challenging for the Partner to observe and analyze.

By the end of this research, Whitehill says he hopes to find practical teaching and coaching strategies that AI Partners can execute that work well with students. Its not clear at all that the way humans teach would work well for a computer, robot, or avatar, he says.

While the computational challenges of the projectsignal processing in extremely noisy and cluttered settings, real-time control in an uncertain environment, and human-computer interaction for a novel settingare formidable, Whitehill says the potential rewards make it worth the effort.

The exciting thing about this project is that we get to completely rethink the role of AI in the classroom, he says. My hope is that, through next-generation educational AI, we will be able to stimulate deeper critical thinking and collaboration among students to help them learn better and achieve more.

Jessica Messier

The rest is here:

Can Artificial Intelligence Help Students Work Better Together? According to Research, the Answer is Yes. - WPI News