AI Goes to School for Math-Instruction Study

Inside a North Carolina middle school classroom, a video camera swivels on its tripod while five microphones capture clues to the age-old question: How do you teach math to kids?

Recordings from this lesson by teacher Mitchelle McLeod and many more like it from across the United States are being fed into an artificial intelligence (AI) program trained to spot instances of student engagement and the teaching practices that elicit learning. 

It’s part of a project funded by a $4.5 million grant from the Gates Foundation/Walton Family Foundation and led by the University of Maryland’s Center for Educational Data Science and Innovation (EDSI) to create a massive database arming scholars and ed-tech companies with real-world classroom data to mine for best practices. 

The three-year UMD effort is led by education policy Associate Professor and EDSI Director Jing Liu, and initially supported by a Grand Challenges Team Project Grant awarded to help educators fight the national trend since the COVID-19 epidemic of falling elementary- and middle-school math scores.

Join Maryland education researchers as they explore the future of teaching and learning in the latest installment of “Enterprise: University of Maryland Research Stories.”