Giving Compass' Take:

· The Hechinger Report discusses the advancement of technology in education and how artificial intelligence can provide better information regarding student learning than just test scores.

· Will automated observer robots help teachers improve instructional skills? Will they provide useful feedback?

· Read about robot teachers and the future of technology in education.

School leaders and education researchers often rely on test scores to judge how well students are learning. But that ignores many important aspects of learning, such as the liveliness of classroom discussion or how engaged and motivated the students are. Expert observers in a classroom can immediately pick up on these unquantifiable moments of great teaching. But human observations are time-consuming and expensive. You can videotape classrooms, but it can be just as tedious and costly to code and analyze the recordings afterward.

Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, teams of education researchers and computer scientists are experimenting with how to build systems that can “see” into and “listen” in on classrooms and instantly analyze the quality of classroom instruction. The technology is improving rather rapidly now, thanks to improvements in natural language processing and automatic speech recognition. At the same time, it takes an enormous amount of work just to teach the robots how to observe one micro aspect of a classroom at a time.

Read the full article about artificial intelligence helping teachers by Jill Barshay at The Hechinger Report.