An AI-Enhanced Colleague for Teachers: Developing and Studying an Innovative Platform for Efficient, Inclusive Middle-Grade Mathematics Lesson Planning
This four-year DRK-12 Design and Development project for Teaching Strand aims to iteratively develop an AI-powered component of Colleague, a lesson planning web platform, to assist teachers in drafting and refining high-quality and inclusive math lessons for middle grades (Grade 6-8) with great time efficiency. The advent of generative AI technologies, exemplified by ChatGPT and Bard, has offered new opportunities for teachers to develop lesson materials, which can enhance teachers creativity and student learning experience. On the other hand, the current offerings by these general-purpose technologies generate lesson plans or instructional materials that are inconsistent in quality, often do not reflect research-based best practices of teaching, or sometimes can be filled with mathematical errors and imprecisions.
To address these challenges, this project innovatively integrates cutting-edge generative AI and math education domain knowledge, serving as a personalized assistant for teachers to plan high quality, tailored, and inclusive lessons to meet diverse student needs in language, academic mastery, and special education needs. This project also studies Colleague’s mechanisms and effects on reducing teachers job stress, improving teachers instructional effectiveness and students’ mathematical learning, and the factors and conditions that enable teachers’ best practices.
The UMD subaward will be used to support the University of Washington research team in developing and testing the alpha version of the Colleague platform, designing the randomized controlled trial, conducting data analysis, and disseminating the findings. PI Liu and Co-PI Ai will have weekly meetings with PI Sun to coordinate research efforts.
Duration:
09/01/2024 - 08/31/2028
Additional UMD Investigator(s):
Co-PI: Jing Lu UMD EDUC | Co-PI: Wei Ai UMD INFO
Additional Non-UMD Investigator(s):
Other: PI: Min Sun UW
Partnering Organization(s):
University of Washington
Total Award Amount:
$147,411.00