On a recent morning, third-grade teacher Sheryl Drakeford at First Avenue Elementary School in Newark projected a difficult math question onto the classroom whiteboard: “Which letters in the word MATHEMATICIAN are consonants?” Did.
Mr. Drakeford knew that the word “consonant” may be unfamiliar to some students. So she suggested seeking help from Khanmigo, a new tutoring bot powered by artificial intelligence.
She paused briefly while about 15 schoolchildren dutifully typed out the same question, “What is a consonant?” — Type into math software. Next, she asked her third graders to share their tutoring bot answers.
“Consonants are the letters in the alphabet that are not vowels,” read aloud one of the students. “The vowels are A, E, I, O, U. The consonants are all other letters.”
The tech industry’s hype and apocalyptic prophecies around AI-enhanced chatbots like ChatGPT have led many schools to scramble to block or limit the use of tools in the classroom this year. Newark Public Schools takes a different approach. He is one of the first school systems in the United States to pilot-test Khan Migo, an automated teaching material developed by Khan Academy, a non-profit educational institution whose online lessons are used in hundreds of school districts. .
Newark is practically volunteering to be a guinea pig for public schools across the country trying to separate the commercialization and marketing promise of a new AI-assisted tutoring bot.
Proponents argue that classroom chatbots could democratize the idea of tutoring by automatically customizing responses to students, allowing students to work at their own pace. Critics warn that because the bots are trained on vast databases of text, they could make up false information that sounds plausible, making it a risky bet for schools.
City officials in Newark, New Jersey’s largest school district, said they are carefully testing tutoring bots at three schools. Their findings could have implications for school districts across the country, which are scrutinizing AI tools for the next school year this summer.
“It’s not going away, so it’s important to introduce it to your students.” Timothy NeregarThe director of instructional technology at Newark Public Schools said of AI-assisted technology: “But you have to understand how it works, the risks, the pros and cons.”
Khan Academy is one of the few online learning companies to create a new tutoring bot based on a language model developed by ChatGPT’s research institute, OpenAI. Khan Academy, home to high-level technology providers such as Google, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Elon Musk Foundation, received access to the AI model last year.
Tutoring bots designed specifically for schools often guide students through the series of steps needed to solve a problem.
When Khan Academy began looking for a school district to pilot test an experimental tutoring bot this spring, Newark volunteered. Many local elementary schools were already using the institution’s online math classes as a way to track student mastery of concepts such as grouping numbers. And the AI tools will be provided free of charge to these schools during the initial pilot testing phase.
School district officials said they wanted to see if canmigos could enhance student participation and math learning. Schools like First Avenue, which is attended by many children from low-income families, also wanted to give students an early opportunity to try new AI-assisted materials.
School districts like Newark (Khanmigo not included) that use Khan Academy’s online lessons, analytics, and other school services pay an annual fee of $10 per student. Participating school districts that want to pilot Canmigo next school year will pay an additional $60 per student, the nonprofit said, noting the AI model’s computing costs are “large.” .
Newark students began using Kahn’s automated materials in May. So far, reviews have been mixed.
One recent morning, the 6th graders at First Avenue Elementary School were working on a statistical assignment that involved creating their own consumer survey. Their teacher, Tito Rodriguez, suggested to the students that he start by asking Canmigo two background questions. “What is a survey?” Why are the questions statistical?
Rodriguez described the bot as a useful “co-teacher” that gave extra time to children in need of guidance, while also allowing more self-motivated students to move forward. .
“Now they don’t have to wait for Mr. Rodriguez,” he said. “They can ask Kanmigo.”
In Drakeford’s math class hallway, the bot’s responses to students sometimes seemed more like direct answers than suggestions.
When students asked Canmigo questions about fractions posted on the classroom whiteboard, the bot replied that the word “mathematician” contains 13 letters, seven of which are consonants. . That is, Bott wrote that the consonant proportion is 7 out of 13, or he is 7/13.
“That’s our biggest concern. Too much thought work goes through Kanmigo,” he said. Alan Usherenko, School District Special Assistant for schools including First Avenue in the North Ward of Newark. The school district doesn’t want bots to guide students step-by-step through problem solving, he said. added.
Khan Academy said in an email that students often need initial support to get through the steps of problem-solving, and that training will automatically get them through the steps without assistance. said it was possible.
The group added that tutoring bots are designed to help students solve problems rather than give them answers. But in the case of the Newark fraction problem, the group said Mr. Canmigo “helped too quickly, too much.”
“Our engineering team fixed the AI a few weeks ago, so we no longer have an answer to this question,” Khan Academy said in an email Tuesday.
On Wednesday, a reporter asked Mr. Canmigo the same fractional question. In student mode, the tutoring bot walked me through the steps and gave me a direct answer: “He has 7/13 consonant proportions in the word ‘MATHEMATICIAN’.”
In teacher mode, which is designed to explain questions and answers to educators, the bot returned a different (wrong) response. Canmigo mistakenly said that the word “mathematician” contains eight consonants. So the bot returned the wrong answer: 8 consonants / 14 total letters = 8/14.
In an email, Khan Academy said it had fixed the issue within its “tutoring: math and science” section for students, pointing out that the reporter had asked the question elsewhere on the site. “Sometimes Kanmigo makes mistakes when it comes to teacher mode giving incorrect answers,” the email said.
Still, Usherenko said there is hope. The district had suggested to Khan Academy that instead of having students ask Kanmigo appropriate questions, it would be more useful for the bot to ask students open-ended questions and analyze their answers.
“I’m not quite where I want to be yet,” Usherenko said of Kanmigo. “But if we can catch the students’ misunderstandings, it will make all the difference.”
Khan Academy said its tutoring bots frequently ask students open-ended questions, and the group is working to help AI models pinpoint misconceptions. The nonprofit added that it continues to improve Kanmigo with feedback from school districts.
It remains to be seen if schools will be able to deploy AI-assisted tutoring bots.
Khan Academy said it will offer discounts to school districts where more than half of its students are eligible for free or discounted lunches. Still, given the economic hurdles, AI-powered classroom chatbots are unlikely to democratize tutoring anytime soon.
Neregar, the city’s director of education and technology for the city of Newark, said the district is looking for outside funding to help cover the cost of Kanmigo this fall.
“The long-term costs of AI are a concern for us,” he said.
