When secondary school mathematics teachers completed an online professional development program based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve their mathematical knowledge and teaching skills, their students’ performance in mathematics improved. My colleagues and I developed this online professional development program, which relies on a virtual facilitator who can—among other things—present the teacher with problems related to teaching mathematics and provide feedback on the teacher’s answers. . Our goal was to increase teachers’ proficiency in the knowledge and skills needed to teach mathematics effectively. These include understanding why the mathematical rules and processes taught in school work.
Funded by the Institute of Education Sciences
The program also focuses on common difficulties students face when learning a particular mathematics concept and how to use instructional tools and strategies to help them overcome these difficulties. We then conducted an experiment in which 53 middle school mathematics teachers were randomly assigned to either AI-based professional development or no additional training. Teachers took an average of 11 hours to complete the program. Then we took a mathematics test of 1,727 of their students. While students from these two groups of teachers started out with no difference in their math performance, students taught by teachers who completed the program increased their math performance by an average of more than 0.18 of a standard deviation. This is a statistically significant gain that is comparable to the average math performance difference between sixth and seventh grade students in the study. Our project was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the US Department of Education.
why it matters
This study demonstrates the potential of using AI technologies to create effective, widely accessible professional development programs for teachers. This is important because teachers often have limited access to high-quality professional development programs to improve their knowledge and teaching skills. Effective professional development programs include opportunities for teachers to solve problems, analyze student work, and observe teaching practices. Teachers also receive real-time support from program facilitators.
what will happen next
Advances in AI technologies will enable researchers to develop more interactive, personalized learning environments for teachers. For example, language processing systems used in generic AI programs like ChatGPT could improve the ability of these programs to more accurately analyze teachers’ responses and provide more personalized opportunities for learning. Additionally, AI technologies can be used to develop new learning materials so that programs like ours can be developed faster. More importantly, AI-based professional development programs can collect rich, real-time conversational data. Such data make it possible to examine how learning occurs from professional development programs and how these programs can be made more effective. Despite billions of dollars spent each year on professional development for teachers, studies show that how teachers learn through professional development programs is still not well understood.