Using AI to tailor the education of primary school students 

Differentiation in the classroom is an important skill for teachers to give all their students the best chance of reaching their full learning potential, regardless of the student's abilities, strengths and weaknesses.

Differentiation means tailoring the learning process in order to meet students’ individual needs. This tailoring is based on a continuous assessment of the student through testing and observation.

Our goal with Edulitics is to combine the potential of e-learning with what we've learnt about the need to create a solution that makes it easier to identify problem areas and give each and every student the support they need.

At present, the average primary class in OECD countries has more than 21 students per teacher. That’s a lot of students for one teacher to observe and keep track of. Moreover, while students in secondary and upper education are able to self-evaluate, primary education students have not yet developed such a skill and are, therefore, unlikely to self-assess and realize that they are struggling and need to seek the teachers’ help.

Though tests do provide a sense of what the student knows, they give no insight into how the student feels. Positive emotions, such as happiness and surprise are linked to a better learning experience as they boost students’ interest and, thus, engagement. Despite this, emotional wellbeing is seldomly used as an assessment tool in education.

The Covid pandemic has brought a lot of these problems to light. Distance learning made it impossible for teachers to be able to look over their students’ shoulders to find out how long it was taking them to complete an exercise, to observe their students in class in order to be able to pick up on which of them were struggling. Distance learning made it clear that we need to start using new technologies that go hand-in-hand with existing e-learning resources in order to be able to best adapt them to each individual student.

Edulitics is a browser add-on that acts as a teacher’s second pair of eyes. The add-on records the student’s screen, as well as picks up on students’ facial expressions every couple of seconds. The underlying AI technology then takes that facial expression, analyses it and labels it as representing one of five emotions: sadness, anger, neutrality, happiness and surprise. Edulitics acknowledges that learning is a complex process that involves not just cognition, but also emotion. We are essentially integrating affective neuroscience and artificial intelligence in order to create an advanced analytics tool for education.

The Covid pandemic has caused a surge in the use of technology and e-learning platforms in schools, hence there’s an opportunity to provide a solution to combat the negative consequences of not having in-person teaching (e.g. teacher observation becomes difficult/impossible, which means some students’ struggles pass unnoticed).

Our application can be used as an observation tool both during an in-class e-learning session or outside of class if students are given e-learning activities as homework. The potential of AI technology for education is manifold. If our project gains the traction we strive for, the add-on could be converted to an education browser, which could potentially allow the application to detect emotion during live teaching.