AI Is’nt Replacing Math Teachers, It’s Making Them Better

How AI is Boosting Teaching Outcomes: What a Recent Study Shows

How AI is Boosting Teaching Outcomes: What a Recent Study Shows

Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash

Can AI help in Education? What do you feel?

Some people feel optimistic and can see the many ways it could help students, teachers, and improve learning outcomes.

Others feel worried that it might be bad, for example causing students to be lazy and not do their work properly, or be used to replace human teachers.

I can understand both feelings.

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

I feel a bit worried about AI being applied in a bad way in education too, and from what I know in my work as an AI professional I also feel excited about what I can see in its great potential for education.

So how do you know which is true? Evidence.

I’ve read about a recent study that tested out an AI system for helping maths teachers with their professional development, and the results were fascinating.

The study provided clear evidence that AI can help teachers improve how they teach.

But how did it help teachers? And what does this mean for you and the future of teaching and education?

AI helps maths teachers with professional development

A recent article in The74 magazine ‘AI Can Teach Math Teachers How to Improve Student Skills’ described a recent study about AI helping maths teachers to improve.

The author of the study Yasemin Copur-Gencturk described her goals:

Our goal was to enhance teachers mastery of the knowledge and skills required to teach math effectively. These include understanding why the mathematical rules and procedures taught in school work. The program also focuses on common struggles students have as they learn a particular math concept, and how to use instructional tools and strategies to help them overcome these struggles.

The study used 53 middle school maths teachers who were randomly split between the AI-based professional training tool and no extra training.

The results of the study found a clear benefit to the teachers who used the AI training tool:

While students of these two groups of teachers started with no difference in their math performance, the students taught by teachers who completed the program increased their mathematics performance by 0.18 of a standard deviation more on average. This is a statistically significant gain that is equal to the average math performance difference between sixth and seventh graders in the study.

You can read the research paper here.

The key takeaway here is that AI made a significant and measurable difference to teaching outcomes.

Why AI in education matters

I’ve written previously about AI helping students learn more quickly and better in ‘Emperor’s Envy: How AI Is Enabling an Elite Education — For You’.

The Emperor’s Envy: How AI Is Enabling an Elite Education — For You
The finest education in history can be yours now — for freemedium.co

In this article, we have seen how AI can help teachers significantly boost their learning outcomes.

Why does this matter?

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