photo by: Adobe Stock

A student writing in a notebook.

With a new artificial intelligence program being developed by University of Kansas researchers, teachers will be able to help students with disabilities improve their writing skills.

Students across the country are struggling to meet writing benchmarks, and writing is crucial for student growth, according to a KU press release. KU researchers have started to establish an AI-boosted program for middle school students to address these challenges – Project AI-SCORE, which stands for Artificial Intelligence Scored Composition to Improve Outcomes for Written Expression.

The project will collaborate with teachers and students with disabilities to increase writing practice, while utilizing technology to enable educators to more efficiently score writing samples and offer immediate feedback, helping students enhance their skills.

“We use writing to convey our knowledge,” Smith told the Journal-World. “There’s so many different things we use writing for, and in the process of this work, we’ve also realized that teachers are so busy. They often don’t have time to score that writing as regularly as they’d like to and provide meaningful feedback to our students as regularly as they’d like to.”

He added that learners who do not receive feedback regularly on their writing, like any other writer, can fall into poor habits.

Smith said that there are many students who have a learning disability. He said they are primarily targeting students who have reading deficits, which often align with writing deficits. He said individuals with autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and even English language learners could benefit from the program as well.

“It’s that broad audience that we’re looking at,” Smith said. “Individuals probably reading two or three grade levels below (and) writing is limited as well, that’s our target audience.”

AI-SCORE will expand on an existing, web-based progress monitoring tool WRITE PM, or Writing stRategies for Instructional Technology in Education – Progress Monitoring. The program has proven effective in helping teachers who work with students with learning disabilities improve writing skills with automatic scoring for quantitative elements of writing such as number of words, word sequence, spelling and number of letters.

The project will also explore another area which has a more qualitative approach, including everything from the ideas students are developing, the organization of their writing, word choices and sentence fluency. Additionally, the system will help teachers identify which instructional supports and technology tools best match each student’s areas of need. The teacher would have all of the data for each student to determine the areas they are succeeding in and what they’re struggling with.

Smith said that an example of what the program could potentially look like is having students respond to a prompt through the online system. Smith added that a lot of struggling writers are also struggling readers. While this specific vision includes students responding via text, the researchers may explore adding a voice interaction so a bot could give feedback on their writing verbally.

“Now, in terms of what that might look like, that’s where we’re still working on,” he said. ” … We’re still in the development stage, (but) those are components we want to be able to put in there.”

The KU researchers are a part of the Life Span Institute and they received a five-year $1.875 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Stepping Up competition.

Smith, educational psychology professor Bruce Frey and doctoral candidate Samantha Goldman will lead the KU-based team of Project AI-SCORE. They are collaborating with national writing experts, Kansas school districts, families of students with disabilities, and technologists to develop innovative AI solutions for the writing process.

In the project’s first year, the researchers will develop the tools within AI-SCORE to support both teachers and students. In the following years, they will expand the project to pilot its use in schools across Kansas. They will then create a tool that can be independently implemented in schools and ensure the long-term sustainability of AI-SCORE beyond the grant period. Throughout the project, the researchers will gather data on implementation, fidelity, and learner outcomes.

Classroom educators and district staff interested in collaborating or learning more about the project are encouraged to reach out to the KU researchers at aiscore@ku.edu.