‘Personalized’ Learning in Math Has Proved Elusive and Overhyped. Can AI Offer a Breakthrough?

Source Domain: www.edweek.org

Math teacher Al Rabanera has a new tool in his decades-long quest to ensure his students, most of whom come from low-income families and marginalized backgrounds, see themselves in the curriculum.

Artificial Intelligence.

Many of of Rabanera’s students at La Vista High School in Fullerton, Calif., an alternative high school, struggled to learn in a traditional setting. But they care deeply about how their classwork connects to the working world.

So, when Rabanera taught rate of change—a statistical concept—he asked a large language model to create an assignment that would help his students better understand a highly relevant topic: the job market.

“Personalizing” lessons to students’ interests—especially in math, a subject that many middle and high schoolers find dry and irrelevant—has been held out as one of the most promising potential upsides of generative AI, the technology that powers large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini. Educators and researchers see a path to capitalize on the technology’s power and get at the elusive goal of customizing lessons for individual students interests, even if years of failed and overhyped attempts at innovation offer reasons for skepticism.

Rabanera’s approach was to put a prompt into an AI tool citing his students’ curiosity about the workforce. It responded with U.S. Department of Labor data showing correlations between education level, gender, and median weekly income.

Then it helped Rabanera brainstorm a list of questions to help his students dig into the numbers, using the statistical strategies they’re working to master.

For instance, students were shown the first and third quartiles of a linear graph and asked to estimate what the second and fourth quartiles might look like, justifying their responses.

When Rabanera asked the class to find themselves in the data, one female student quickly grasped what the income numbers met meant for her: “Whoa, Mr. Rab! I’m gonna get paid less…

Source