Recently, the UK government has awarded £1 million of funding to 16 ed tech companies to build teacher AI tools for feedback and marking, to help drive improvements in education standards.
King’s College London is among 16 UK start-ups and universities chosen by the Department for Education to develop cutting-edge AI tools for the classroom. Professor Yulan He will develop a platform for teachers capable of delivering personalised assessment and feedback to their students studying A Level science subjects. He has already developed an AERA Chat tool, whose architecture is shown in the figure below. For further details, please read his open access research article at https://arxiv.org/html/2410.09507v1
In the frame of this funding, King’s College London will develop a platform based on their existing tool that Professor He has developed with AQA (Assessments and Qualifications Alliance – https://www.aqa.org.uk) thanks to funding from the EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account, which provides explainable pupil answer scoring. In the AERA Chat platform, teachers can upload questions, key answer elements, and marking rubrics. It then marks pupil answers in bulk or individually, generating both marking decisions and rationales. AERA’s output is shown in the figure below.
Specifically, this project directly addresses the challenge of improving formative assessment and feedback in secondary school science education using AI. The personalised feedback tailored to specific students’ learning goals and knowledge levels will promote a deeper understanding in science subjects, and free up time-poor teachers by automating a resource-intensive process.
To know more about the project, please visit https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/kings-to-build-ai-tool-for-teachers-as-part-of-governments-ai-drive
To know more about their AI-platform, please watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIK2OM99Hb8
The government press release can be viewed at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ai-teacher-tools-set-to-break-down-barriers-to-opportunity
