A central challenge of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning is how to promote deep conceptual learning via rich socio-collaborative learning experiences. To meet this challenge, the Institute for Student-AI Teaming will reframe the role of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in education, moving towards a future where AI is viewed as a social, collaborative partner that helps students work and learn more effectively, engagingly, and equitably, while helping educators focus on what they do best: inspiring and teaching students. The Institute will develop, deploy, and study AI Partners that interact naturally with students and teachers through speech, gesture, gaze, and facial expression in real-world classrooms and remote learning settings. The AI partners will be designed in close collaboration with educators with the aim of supporting students to develop STEM competencies, disciplinary practices, and 21st century skills of collaborative problem solving and critical thinking. These AI Partners will observe, participate in, and support small groups of students to engage in deep and sustained learning conversations, while assisting teachers in orchestrating effective learning experiences at the individual, small group, and whole-class levels. The focal content domain will be AI education, thus contributing to growing a diverse workforce of future AI researchers and practitioners. The long-term impact of the Institute is to help realize the grand challenge of “Education for Allâ€, by leading the nation towards a future where all students – especially those whose identities are underrepresented in STEM – routinely participate in rich and rewarding AI-enabled collaborative learning experiences that scale across a large number of classrooms, resulting in deeper student engagement and persistence in STEM, more inclusive classroom cultures, and significant improvements in learning outcomes. The Institute will support workforce development though sustained engagement of diverse youth and national dissemination of AI-enabled curricula. Realizing this impact will require the Institute to develop foundational advances in AI technology, consistent with the National AI Research and Development plan which calls for significant advances in human-AI collaboration.
The Institute for Student-AI Teaming brings together a geographically distributed team of researchers from nine Universities (University of Colorado Boulder; Colorado State University; University of California, Santa Cruz; University of California, Berkeley; Brandeis University; Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne; University of Wisconsin-Madison) with partners from academia, K-12 school districts, and industry. The Institute will adopt responsible innovation and polycultural approaches for developing ethical AI technologies by integrating foundational and use-inspired AI research across more than 12 interdisciplinary research areas - spanning the computing, learning, cognitive and affective sciences. This research program will be conducted in close partnership with K12 educators, gender and racially diverse students, parents, and other community stakeholders to ensure that the resulting technologies address community needs and reflect community values. Efforts will grow a diverse workforce of future AI researchers and practitioners by engaging 5,000 middle/high school students in innovative AI education through AI-enabled pedagogies. The Institute’s research program will yield fundamental advances in multimodal processing, natural language understanding, affective computing, and knowledge representation to develop AI models that can autonomously monitor the unfolding learning discourse at multiple levels – understanding the content, the conversational dynamics, gestures, and social signals– and learn to generate appropriate dialog moves to be effective partners in the learning conversations. It will advance the new science of student-AI teaming in the form of theoretical frameworks, innovative interaction paradigms that consider the cognitive, affective, and social dimensions of the interaction, and novel human-AI architectures for orchestrating effective student and teacher interactions with AI learning partners. The Institute will advance the science of inclusive co-design by developing methodologies to empower diverse stakeholders to envision, co-create, and critique AI technologies for their schools and communities. These advances will be achieved through a highly interdisciplinary research methodology blending algorithm development, user-centered design, neurophysiological modeling, design-based research, curriculum co-design, and classroom field trials. Research products, including curricula and software, will be openly and broadly disseminated, including sharing of data after establishing consent, data security, and privacy-protection. To promote collaboration and knowledge transfer, a dedicated Community Hub will provide services to integrate participants and partner organizations and will coordinate opening up the Institute to the broader community. The Institute will be evaluated along metrics of effectiveness, equity, efficiency, generalizability, and impact, both internally and via an external advisory board. Overall, the Institute will serve as a national nexus point for empowering diverse stakeholders to engage in responsible co-design of student-AI collaborative technologies.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
