Artificial Intelligence In

Education
Promises and Implications for
Teaching and Learning

Wayne Holmes, Maya Bialik, Charles Fadel

© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved

The Center for Curriculum Redesign, Boston, MA, 02130
Copyright © 2019 by Center for Curriculum Redesign
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America

Artificial Intelligence in Education

Promises and Implications for Teaching and Learning

ISBN-13: 978-1-794-29370-0
ISBN-10: 1-794-29370-0

A pdf version with active links is available at: http://bit.ly/AIED-

BOOK

Keywords: Education technology, EdTech, artificial intelligence, machine

learning, deep learning, AI, AIED, curriculum, standards, competencies,
competency, CBL, deeper learning, knowledge, skills, character,
metacognition, meta-learning, mindset, 21st century education, social-
emotional skills, 21st century competencies, education redesign, 21st
century curriculum, pedagogy, learning, jobs, employment, employability,
eduployment, Education 2030, fourth Industrial Revolution, exponential
technology, personalized learning, competency-based learning,
individualized learning, adaptive learning.

© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved

 Introduction: The Context
Artificial intelligence (AI) is arguably the driving technological force of
the first half of this century, and will transform virtually every industry, if
not human endeavors at large.1 Businesses and governments worldwide
are pouring enormous sums of money into a very wide array of
implementations, and dozens of start-ups are being funded to the tune of
billions of dollars.

Funding of AI startup companies worldwide, from 2013 to 2017

(in millions of U.S. dollars). Source: Statista2

It would be naive to think that AI will not have an impact on

education—au contraire, the possibilities there are profound yet, for the
time being, overhyped as well. This book attempts to provide the right
balance between reality and hype (per the Gartner diagram that follows),
between true potential and wild extrapolations. Every new technology
undergoes a period of intense growth of reputation and expectations,
followed by a precipitous fall when it inevitably fails to live up to the
expectations, after which there is a slower growth as the technology is
developed and integrated into our lives. As visualized in the Gartner
diagram, each technology can be said to reside somewhere on the curve

1 Possibly
matched only by biotechnology.
2https://www.statista.com/statistics/621468/worldwide-artificial-intelligence-startup-company-funding-by-
year
2 Artificial Intelligence in Education

at any given time (for example Deep Learning, which is part of AI, is
currently peaking).

Source: Gartner Inc.3

It is of course a risky proposition then, in a field moving so fast, to

attempt to predict the future. As such, this work will likely be updated
periodically to keep up with the developments (just as you would expect
from software/apps).
This book is organized around a somewhat glib quote: “There are
only two problems in education: What we teach, and how we teach it.”4
Hence this book is divided into two parts, one focused on the What, and
one on the How of AI in education.

3 http://www.Gartner.com/SmarterWithGartner
4 Dr Roger Schank, https://www.rogerschank.com/
Artificial Intelligence in Education 3

The What
We’re headed for a world where you’re either going to be able to
write algorithms … or be replaced by algorithms.
—Bridgewater hedge-fund billionaire Ray Dalio
The first part of this book explores the question: What should students
learn in an age of AI? And all the corollary, provocatively phrased
questions: “If you can search, or have an intelligent agent find, anything,
why learn anything? What is truly worth learning?”

It is widely expected that AI will have an enormous impact on what

we teach, as it will impact many occupations. Take for instance the
Organization for Economic and Co-operative Development (OECD)
Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies
(PIAAC)5 survey, which measures adults’ proficiency in key information-
processing skills—literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-
rich environments—and gathers information and data on how adults use
their skills at home and at work. Already, AI is matching more than 50%
of adult human-proficiency levels, and closing in on another 36%.

Proficiency Level OECD Adults Artificial Intelligence

2 and below 53% Yes

3 36% Close
4–5 11% No
Source: Elliott Stuart, “Computers and the Future of Skill Demand.”6

Such progress is bound to continue at an accelerating, pace. IBM’s

Open Leaderboard effort attempts to understand the progress being
made by tracking many variables. According to IBM’s Leaderboard, AI
should be getting into the realm of deeper self-learning by the early 2020s

5 https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/

6 https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/computers-and-the-future-of-skill-demand_9789264284395-

en#page1
© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved
4 Artificial Intelligence in Education

and become capable of assisting, collaborating, coaching and mediating

by the early 2030s.

Perceive World Develop Cognition Build Relationships Fill Roles

Coach & Mentor

Understanding

Conversations

Collaborator
Recognition

Interactions

Assistant &
Reasoning
Memory
Pattern

Fluent
Social
Video

Learning from Labeled Training Data and

Searching (Optimization)
Learn by Watching and Reading
(Education)
Learn by Doing and being Responsible
(Exploration)
2015 2018 2021 2024 2027 2030 2033 2036
Source: Jim Spohrer, IBM7

Given all the above, the What section makes a case for the necessity to
focus on a broad, deep, and versatile education as a hedge against
uncertain futures, which in turn means a reinvigorated focus on the deeper
learning goals of a modern education:
• Versatility, for robustness to face life and work.
• Relevance, for applicability, and student motivation.
• Transfer,8 for broad future actionability.
All of which are to be developed via:
• Selective emphasis on important areas of traditional
knowledge.
• The addition of modern knowledge.
• A focus on essential content and core concepts.
• Interdisciplinarity, using real-world applications.
• Embedded skills, character, and meta learning into the
knowledge domains.

7 IBM, 2017, Cognitive Opentech Group.

8 This refers to the transfer of knowledge from a domain it was learned in to another domain.
Artificial Intelligence in Education 5

The How
The second part of this book addresses the question: How can AI
enhance and transform education? First, it is important to make the
distinction between education technology (EdTech) at large and artificial
intelligence in education (AIED) specifically. A quick summary of the
affordances of EdTech is appropriate at this stage, as the taxonomy and
ontology of the field is quite murky. Using the SAMR9 model that
follows, the How section showcases how AIED will span all layers, with
its maximum impact growing as it moves up the stack.

Substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition model (SAMR).

Note that the examples shown in the preceding figure represent

today’s apps, not tomorrow’s, and only serve to help explain the model.
Often these apps are collapsed under one term, technology, and then
there is much confusion about the potential of technology. This model
helps us to delineate the different types of impact that technology can
have, from mere substitution with no functional changes, all the way
through the creation of new, previously inconceivable tasks as a result of
technology.

9 Dr. Ruben Puentedura, http://www.hippasus.com/

© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved
6 Artificial Intelligence in Education

The Role of Assessments

What gets measured gets managed.—Lord Kelvin

Assessments have been the hidden villain behind a lot of education

debates, and a powerful one at enshrining institutional inertia.
Repurposing the famous Aristotelian syllogism:10

Lack of, or poor, education is at the root of many human

problems.
Assessments define the education we get.
Therefore, assessments are the root of many human
problems.
Although not a focus of this book, it is clear that assessments have an
oversized role to play in the change process, and as part of the AI-driven
systems of (mostly formative) assessments.
Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD’s Directorate of Education
and Skills, publicly stated “What is easy to measure is also easy to
automate,” thereby throwing the gauntlet to the assessment world to
readjust its focus and thus drive change.

Lastly
Readers will have different priorities and interest in this topic.
Policymakers and curriculum designers may initially favor the What
section, while teachers and IT specialists may at first favor the How
section.
The What and How sections are therefore written to be independent
of each other; the appendices also reflect an emphasis on digestibility,
particularly for the technical details.
Further, we are all pressed for time, so our writing philosophy is, to
use Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s words, “Perfection is attained not when
there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything
to take away.” This book is therefore not meant to be an in-depth

10 “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Socrates is mortal.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism

Artificial Intelligence in Education 7

academic piece, but rather it is meant to be concise and to the point, and
adhere to Yuval Harari's philosophy: “In a world deluged with irrelevant
information, clarity is power.”11
We wish you all very pleasant reading, and invite your feedback at:
[email protected]

11 Harari, Y. (2018). 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau.
© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved
8 Artificial Intelligence in Education

Part Two
The How: Promises and Implications of AI
for Teaching and Learning
Seldom a day goes by without at least a mention in the news or
entertainment media of AI. Perhaps an AI program has just beaten the
world’s leading player in a complex strategy game; perhaps a new
Hollywood feature film depicts a dystopian future in which robots have
overtaken the world; or perhaps a pair of leading tech entrepreneurs have
a public disagreement.12
I have exposure to the very cutting-edge AI, and I think
people should be really concerned about it. … AI is a rare
case where we need to be proactive about regulation
instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are
reactive in AI regulation, it’s too late.
—Elon Musk
I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these
doomsday scenarios … I just, I don't understand it. It's
really negative and, in some ways, I actually think it is
pretty irresponsible.
—Mark Zuckerberg
In fact, as the exchange between Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla) suggests, the future impact of AI remains
very unclear (indeed, is artificial intelligence little more than the latest
technical hype?).13 Nevertheless, investments and developments continue
to grow exponentially, such that AI has become an integral, pervasive

12 E.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/technology/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-artificial-
intelligence.html
13 “Highly-publicized projects like Sophia [http://www.hansonrobotics.com/robot/sophia] [try to] convince

us that true AI—human-like and perhaps even conscious— is right around the corner. But in reality, we’re
not even close. The true state of AI research has fallen far behind the technological fairy tales we’ve been led
to believe. And if we don’t treat AI with a healthier dose of realism and skepticism, the field may be stuck in
this rut forever.” Dan Robitzski quote (2018) at https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence-hype
Artificial Intelligence in Education 9

and inescapable, although often hidden, part of our daily lives: from Siri 14
to auto-journalism,15 from forecasting stock movements16 to predicting
crime,17 from facial recognition18 to medical diagnoses19 and beyond.
But of particular interest here, artificial intelligence has also quietly
entered the classroom.20 Whether students, teachers, parents and policy
makers welcome it or not, so-called intelligent, adaptive, or personalized
learning systems are increasingly being deployed in schools and
universities21 around the world, gathering and analyzing huge amounts of
student big data, and significantly impacting the lives of students and
educators.22 However, while many assume that artificial intelligence in
education (AIED) means students being taught by robot teachers, the
reality is more prosaic yet still has the potential to be transformative.
Nonetheless, the application of AI to education raises far-reaching
questions.
We should ask what happens when we remove care from
education.... What happens to thinking and writing when...
the whole educational process is offloaded to the
machines—to “intelligent tutoring systems,” “adaptive
learning systems,” or whatever the latest description may
be? What sorts of signals are we sending students?
—Audrey Watters23

14 https://www.apple.com/uk/ios/siri
15 E.g., https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2018/06/12/the-washington-post-plans-extensive-
coverage-of-2018-midterm-elections/?utm_term=.e66d88e4a716
16 E.g., https://equbot.com

17 E.g., http://www.predpol.com

18 E.g., https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-deploys-facial-recognition-biometric-

technology-1-tsa-checkpoint
19 E.g., https://www.babylonhealth.com

20 Luckin, R., et al. (2016). Intelligence Unleashed. An Argument for AI in Education. Pearson.

https://www.pearson.com/content/dam/one-dot-com/one-dot-com/global/Files/about-
pearson/innovation/Intelligence-Unleashed-Publication.pdf
21 “The time-to-adoption for adaptive learning technologies and artificial intelligence is estimated within two

to three years, acknowledging the advances in these technologies and their promise to positively impact
teaching and learning.” Becker, S.A., et al. (2018). “Horizon Report: 2018.” Higher Education Edition 2.
22 Holmes, W., et al. (2018). Technology-Enhanced Personalised Learning. Untangling the Evidence. Robert Bosch

Stiftung.
23 http://hackeducation.com/2015/08/10/digpedlab

© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved

10 Artificial Intelligence in Education

In fact, AI technologies have been researched in educational contexts

for around fifty years.24 More recently, companies as influential as
Amazon, Google and Facebook have invested millions of dollars25
developing AIED products, joining well-established multimillion dollar-
funded AIED companies such as Knewton26 and Carnegie Learning,27
while the $15 million Global Learning XPrize28 called for software that
empowers children to take control of their own learning (AIED by
another name). Meanwhile, AI is being introduced into some mainstream
schools as a curriculum in its own right,29 is being developed to improve
online tutoring,30 and is being researched as a way of enhancing teacher
training.31 In short, the application of AI in educational contexts is
growing exponentially,32 such that by 2024 it is predicted to become a
market worth almost $6 billion.33
While we may have some limited knowledge or experience of
mainstream AI, either from the media or in our daily lives, for many the
use of AI in education remains a mystery. A multitude of yet-to-be-
answered questions spring to mind. How exactly can AI work in
classrooms, and what can be achieved? With AI requiring so much data,
how is student privacy maintained? What will be AI’s long-term effects
on teacher roles? Are the proponents of AIED promising more than can

24 Woolf, B. (1988). “Intelligent tutoring systems: A survey.’ In Exploring Artificial Intelligence: 1–43; Cumming,
G., and McDougall, A. (2000). “Mainstreaming AIED into education?” International Journal of Artificial
Intelligence in Education 11: 197–207; du Boulay, B. (2016). “Artificial intelligence as an effective classroom
assistant.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 31 (6): 76–81. https://doi.org/10.1109/MIS.2016.93
25 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tech-giants-quietly-invest-adaptive-learning-system-rd-drew-carson

26 http://www.knewton.com

27 http://www.carnegielearning.com

28 https://learning.xprize.org

29 http://www.gettingsmart.com/2018/07/coming-this-fall-to-montour-school-district-americas-first-public-

school-ai-program
30 Following a $300m investment, the Chinese online tutoring company Yuanfudao has set up a research

institute for artificial intelligence, which aims to train its homework app to be smarter.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/26/yuanfudao-raises-300-million/
31 O’Connell, S. (2018). “New Project Aims to Use Artificial Intelligence to Enhance Teacher Training.”

Center for Digital Education. http://www.govtech.com/education/higher-ed/New-Project-Aims-to-Use-

Artificial-Intelligence-to-Enhance-Teacher-Training.html
32 https://www.eschoolnews.com/2017/05/22/brace-ai-set-explode-next-4-years

33 https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/artificial-intelligence-ai-in-education-market
Artificial Intelligence in Education 11

be delivered? What is the impact of AI on student agency and outcomes?

And what are the social and ethical consequences?
However, we begin with a tentative response to an ostensibly simpler
question: what does AIED actually look like?

AI in Education
As a brief review of AIED conference and journal papers will confirm,
AIED includes everything from AI-driven, step-by-step personalized
instructional and dialogue systems, through AI-supported exploratory
learning, the analysis of student writing, intelligent agents in game-based
environments, and student-support chatbots, to AI-facilitated
student/tutor matching that puts students firmly in control of their own
learning. It also includes students interacting one-to-one with computers,
whole-school approaches, students using mobile phones outside the
classroom, and much more besides. In addition, AIED can also shine a
light on learning and educational practices.
The field of AIED is both derivative and innovative. On the one
hand, it brings theories and methodologies from related fields such as AI,
cognitive science, and education. On the other hand, it generates its own
larger research issues and questions: What is the nature of knowledge,
and how is it represented? How can an individual student be helped to
learn? Which styles of teaching interaction are effective, and when should
they be used? What misconceptions do learners have?34
While AIED tools necessarily instantiate specific learning theories
(such as Gagné’s “instructionalism”35 or Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal
development”36), some AIED researchers question the assumptions
behind those theories, applying AI and data analysis techniques to try to
open the “black box of learning.”37 In other words, AIED effectively

34 Woolf, B.P. (2010). Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors: Student-Centered Strategies for Revolutionizing e-Learning.
Morgan Kaufmann, 11.
35 Gagné, R.M. (1985). Conditions of Learning and Theory of Instruction, 4th Revised Edition. Wadsworth Publishing

Co Inc.
36 Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press.

37 Luckin, R., et al. Intelligence Unleashed. An Argument for AI in Education.

© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved

12 Artificial Intelligence in Education

involves two main complementary strands: developing AI-based tools to

support learning, and using these tools to help understand learning (how
learning happens and other questions that have long been investigated by
the learning sciences, and which might be applied in classrooms whether
or not AI is being used). For example, by modeling how students go
about solving an arithmetic problem and identifying misconceptions that
might have been previously unknown to educators, researchers and
teachers can begin to understand much more about the process of
learning itself, which might then be applied to mainstream classroom
practices.
In fact, new AIED applications and approaches, addressing old and
newly identified problems, are being researched and released all the
time—such that, what AIED looks like and can do is still emerging.
Accordingly, here we adopt an alternative approach. Rather than trying to
define AIED, within some relatively easy-to-identify broad areas we will
discuss a wide range of AIED examples—existing AIED tools and
AIED tools that might be available in the not-too-distant future.
What this book does not include, but what might nonetheless have a
major impact on education, is the use of AI to support school and
university administrative functions such as class timetabling, staff
scheduling, facilities management, finances, cybersecurity, safety and
security. Instead, we focus on the use of AI to support learning, what
might be called the academic (or system-facing) functions of AIED.
However, before doing so, it will be helpful to have at least a working
understanding of AI itself.38 That is where we go now, before returning
to look in more detail at how AI works in educational contexts. We
conclude by considering the various challenges, pragmatic and ethical,
from the perspectives of AIED researchers and developers, as well as of
educators, students, funders and policy-makers.

38It has been argued that “Artificial Intelligence should be accessible to all of us, even without a math
background.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqjP7O9SxOM&list=PLtmWHNX-gukLQlMvtRJ19s7-
8MrnRV6h6
Artificial Intelligence in Education 13

The Background of AI
AI is one of those aspects of modern life about which most of us have
some awareness, and yet recognize we have little knowledge.39 In fact, for
many AI is synonymous with humanoid robots,40 which might be
because news about AI is almost always illustrated with a picture of a
robot or a digital brain. However, while robotics (embodied AI, that can
move and physically interact with the world) is a core area of AI research,
AI is being applied in many different ways and different contexts.
Meanwhile, the dystopian images of futuristic robots remain firmly in the
realm of science fiction (which is why for the most part we leave robotics
well alone). In the next few pages, we provide a brief background to
artificial intelligence; interested readers will find more information about
the origins and development of AI and its various techniques in appendix
2.
However, first, we should acknowledge that the very name artificial
intelligence is sometimes seen as unhelpful. Instead, some researchers
prefer augmented intelligence, which retains the human brain as the
source of intelligence, and positions the computer and its programs as a
sophisticated tool with which humans might enhance or augment our
intellectual capabilities. In this approach, computers are employed to do
what humans find more difficult (such as finding patterns in huge
amounts of data). The debate contrasting augmented and artificial will
inevitably run and run, with artificial intelligence winning at least on
popular usage even if augmented intelligence is more accurate or useful.
Accordingly, hereafter we will take the ultimate pragmatic approach and
refer almost exclusively to AI, leaving the reader to decide for themselves
what the A in AI represents.

39E.g., “What is artificial intelligence?” https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-is-artificial-intelligence

40 The question “When you think of AI, what is the first thing that comes into your head?” has been posed in
numerous lectures and surveys about AI in education. The evidence is anecdotal, but overwhelmingly
participants answer: robots.
© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved
14 Artificial Intelligence in Education

A 1956 workshop held at Dartmouth College, a US Ivy League

research university, is widely considered to be AI’s foundational event.41
It was where what is thought to be the first AI program, the Logic
Theorist, was presented and discussed. Over the following decades, AI
developed in fits and starts with periods of rapid progress (for example,
rule-based expert systems) interspaced with periods known as AI winters
where confidence and funding all but evaporated.
In recent decades, thanks to three key developments (the advent of
faster computer processors, the availability of large amounts of big data,
and advances in computational approaches) AI has entered a period of
renaissance—AI has now become an integral, pervasive, and inescapable,
although often hidden, part of our daily lives. In fact, paradoxically, the
more that it is integrated, the less we tend to think of it as AI.
A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general
applications, often without being called AI because once
something becomes useful enough and common enough
it’s not labeled AI anymore.42
Instead, AI is often known as an advanced computer program (such
as email spam filtering),43a personal assistant (such as Cortana),44 a
recommendation system (such as in Netflix),45 or perhaps a language-
learning app (such as Duolingo).46 Having said that, recent voice-activated
smart speakers, such as Google Home47 and Amazon Echo,48 have made
AI more visible in our living rooms. In fact, many recent developments
in AI are both groundbreaking and in many ways transformative.
Relatively recent AI computational approaches, such as machine learning

41 Crevier, D. (1993). AI. The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence. Basic Books.
42 http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/07/24/ai.bostrom/index.html (Professor Nick Bostrom,
director of the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford).
43 E.g., https://www.mailwasher.net uses Bayesian techniques to learn which emails are spam and which are

not.
44 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cortana

45 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/9898

46 https://www.duolingo.com

47 https://store.google.com/gb/product/google_home

48 https://www.amazon.com/b/?ie=UTF8&node=9818047011
Artificial Intelligence in Education 15

(supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning), neural networks

(including deep learning), and evolutionary algorithms have all been used
in a diverse range of applications (interested readers will find more
information about these techniques in appendix 2).
For example, recent advances in face recognition (ensuring that faces
in smartphone photographs are always in sharp focus, and identifying
travelers at e-passport gates) are thanks to the application of neural
networks and machine learning. Google researchers presented a brain-
inspired AI neural network with 10 million randomly selected video
thumbnails from YouTube.49 By using deep-learning techniques, and
despite not being told how to recognize anything in particular, this
machine learning system soon learned how to detect human faces in
photographs. Two years later, Facebook introduced a nine-layer deep AI
neural network, involving more than 120 million parameters, to identify
(not just detect) faces in timeline photographs.50 It was trained on a
dataset of four million images of faces that had previously been labeled
by humans (the Facebook users, who had been happily labeling their
friends in uploaded photographs over several years).
Another area that has seen much AI development in recent years is
autonomous vehicles, with neural networks being used to enable cars,
trucks, and taxis to drive without human intervention. A complex rig of
cameras and sensors collate massive amounts of real-time data (the road’s
edges and markings, road signs and traffic lights, other vehicles including
bicycles, other potential obstacles, and pedestrians), while a neural
network-driven intelligent agent, drawing on massive of computing
power, controls the car’s steering, acceleration, and braking. A probably
less well-known use of AI is in journalism. News organizations around
the world are developing AI technologies to support their news gathering
and news reporting. For example, AI agents continually monitor global

49 https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-

learning.html?_r=1
50 Facebook introduced a nine-layer deep AI neural network, involving more than 120 million parameters, to

identify (not just detect) faces in timeline photographs. It was trained on a dataset of four million images.
© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved
16 Artificial Intelligence in Education

news outlets and use semantic analysis to automatically extract key

information that is made available to the journalists to write their
stories.51 There are even some AI technologies that go one step further
and automatically write the stories themselves.52
Another application of AI is in law, where e-Discovery tools are being
used by lawyers to help process the huge amounts of documentation that
need to be reviewed as potential evidence in civil or criminal legal cases.53
One technique involves a machine learning analysis of a sample of
documents that have been reviewed and labeled by an expert. The
outcomes enable the AI to then identify which of the remaining
documents need to be prioritized for in-depth review. A final brief
example is the use of AI in medical diagnoses. For example, AI
techniques are used by radiologists to help them identify anomalies in
medical images more quickly while making fewer mistakes.54 One system
looks for irregularities in X-ray images. If, for example, it finds nodules
on an image of a pair of lungs, it sends it to a pulmonary radiologist for
further checks.

AI Techniques and Terminology

While it is relatively straightforward to understand what the applications
of AI outlined in the previous section are doing, understanding how they
are doing it can require some highly technical knowledge—exacerbated
by the fact that any one AI application might draw on several different
AI techniques. This is one reason why many people involved in AI have
advanced degrees in mathematics or physics (although AI is increasingly
being offered as a service: for example, Amazon’s Machine Learning on
AWS,55 Google’s TensorFlow,56 IBM’s Watson,57 and Microsoft’s

51 E.g., http://bbcnewslabs.co.uk/projects/juicer
52 E.g., https://narrativescience.com/Products/Our-Products/Quill
53 E.g., https://talkingtech.cliffordchance.com/en/emerging-technologies/artificial-intelligence/ai-and-the-

future-for-legal-services.html
54 Hosny, A., et al. (2018). “Artificial intelligence in radiology.” Nature Reviews Cancer 18 (8): 500–510.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41568-018-0016-5
55 https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning

56 https://www.tensorflow.org
Artificial Intelligence in Education 17

Azure).58 Nonetheless, because some AI techniques have already been

repeatedly mentioned, and because they play important roles in AIED
and so will be mentioned again, some key and closely interlinked AI
techniques and terminologies will next be introduced.59 At times (despite
our best efforts) our discussion will be somewhat technical; so please feel
free to jump to the next section, to move directly onto our discussion of
the application of AI in education (which, after all, is the reason we are all
here).
Algorithms
Algorithms are at the core of AI, such that the history of AI might be
thought of as the history of the development of increasingly
sophisticated and increasingly efficient (or elegant) algorithms. Probably
the most famous algorithm of recent times is PageRank,60 which was
developed in 1996 by the founders of Google while they were students at
Stanford University. It ranks the relative importance of a website, by
counting the number of external links to the website’s pages, to
determine where the website appeared in a Google search. In fact, all
computer programs are algorithms. They comprise hundreds if not
thousands of lines of code, representing sets of mathematical instructions
that the computer follows in order to solve problems (compute a
numerical calculation, grammar-check an essay, process an image, or
explain patterns that we see in nature).61 All that makes AI algorithms
distinct from other computer programs is that they involve some specific
approaches and, as we have noted, they are applied to areas we might
think of as essentially human—such as visual perception, speech
recognition, decision-making and learning.

57 https://www.ibm.com/watson

58 https://azure.microsoft.com

59 Readers wishing to learn more about AI techniques might be interested in Russell, S. and Norvig, P. (2016).
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 3rd Edition. Pearson; and Domingos, P. (2017). The Master Algorithm:
How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World. Penguin.
60 PageRank of Site = Σ [PageRank of inbound link/Number of links on that page].

61 Turing, A. (1952). “The chemical basis of morphogenesis.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 237

(641): 37–72.
© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved
18 Artificial Intelligence in Education

Machine Learning
Much early, rule-based AI involves writing in advance the steps that the
computer will take to complete a task, rules that will be followed exactly.
Machine learning, on the other hand, is about getting computers to act
without being given every step in advance. Instead of the algorithms
being programmed exactly what to do, broadly speaking they have the
ability to learn what to do. This is not to suggest that machine learning
does not require large amounts of programming, because it does. But
rather that, instead of direct commands leading to direct outputs,
machine learning involves large amounts of input data to predict novel
outcomes.
Machine learning algorithms analyze the data to identify patterns and
to build a model which is then used to predict future values (for example,
by identifying patterns in historical stocks data, AI predicts future stock
movements; by identifying patterns in photographs of named people, it
predicts who is shown in other photographs; and by identifying patterns
in medical symptoms, it predicts a specific diagnosis). In other words,
machine learning may be considered a three-step process (analyze data,
build a model, undertake an action) that is continuously iterated (the
outcomes of the action generate new data, which in turn amends the
model, which in turn causes a new action). It is in this sense that the
machine is learning.
Many recent applications (including natural language processing, self-
driving cars, and the Google DeepMind AlphaGo program that beat the
world’s number one player of Go)62 have all been made possible thanks
to machine learning. In fact, machine learning is so widespread today
that, for some commentators, AI and machine learning have become
synonymous—whereas machine learning is more properly a sub-field of
AI. What is true, however, is that the renaissance and exponential growth
of AI over the last decade, has come about because of significant

62https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/15/googles-alphago-seals-4-1-victory-over-
grandmaster-lee-sedol
Artificial Intelligence in Education 19

advances in machine learning (based on, as we have noted, faster

computer processors, the availability of large amounts of big data, and
new computational approaches).63
There are three main categories of machine learning: supervised,
unsupervised, and reinforcement learning.
Supervised Learning
Most practical machine learning involves supervised learning. The AI is
first provided large amounts of data for which the output is already
known—in other words, data that has already been labeled. For example,
the AI might be given many thousands of photographs of streets in
which the numerous visible objects (bicycles, road signs, pedestrians, etc.)
have already been identified and labeled by humans. The supervised
learning algorithm aims to identify the function that links the data to the
labels, from which it builds a model that can be applied to new similar
data. This is broadly speaking the approach, mentioned earlier, used by
Facebook to identify people in photographs, which used millions of
photographs submitted and labeled by Facebook users to identify and
label automatically the same people in new photographs.
Unsupervised Learning64
In unsupervised learning, the AI is provided with even larger amounts of
data, but this time data that has not been categorized or classified, that is
to say data that is not labeled. By analyzing this unlabeled data,
unsupervised learning algorithms aim to uncover hidden patterns in the
underlying structure of the data, clusters of data that can be used to
classify new data (this is broadly the approach, mentioned earlier, used by
Google to detect faces in photographs). Example applications of
unsupervised learning include dividing online shoppers into groups so

63 Interestingly,
the origins of machine learning can be traced back to at least 1959, with the publication of
“Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers” by an IBM researcher.
64 A comprehensive list of the algorithms available on one of the leading “AI as a service” platforms,

Microsoft Azure, is available at http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/6/1/A613E11E-8F9C-424A-

B99D-65344785C288/microsoft-machine-learning-algorithm-cheat-sheet-v6.pdf
© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved
20 Artificial Intelligence in Education

they can be served tightly targeted advertisements;65 identifying different

letters and numbers from examples of handwriting; and distinguishing
between legitimate and fraudulent financial transactions.
Reinforcement Learning
In some senses, reinforcement learning is the most powerful of the
machine learning categories. In both supervised and unsupervised
learning, the model derived from the data is fixed, and if the data changes
the analysis has to be undertaken again (in other words, the algorithm is
run once more). However, reinforcement learning involves continuously
improving the model based on feedback—in other words, this is machine
learning in the sense that the learning is ongoing. The AI is provided with
some initial data from which it derives its model, which is evaluated,
assessed as correct or incorrect, and rewarded or punished accordingly
(to use a computer game metaphor, its score is increased or reduced).
The AI uses this positive or negative reinforcement to update its model
and then it tries again, thus developing iteratively (learning and evolving)
over time. For example, if an autonomous car avoids a collision, the
model that enabled it to do so is rewarded (reinforced), enhancing its
ability to avoid collisions in the future.
Artificial Neural Networks
An artificial neural network is an AI algorithm that is based on the
structure and functions of biological neural networks (i.e. animal brains),
that might be applied in advanced supervised, unsupervised, or
reinforcement learning. Our brains are made up of billions of individual
neurons, each of which is connected to as many as a thousand other
neurons, giving trillions of connections. Memory is thought to emerge
from complex combinations of these connections across the brain, while
learning is thought to involve the strengthening of those connections.

65In a now-infamous story, the US retailer Target automatically identified a teenager as being pregnant, before
she had told anyone, just by her store purchases, and some unsupervised learning.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-
before-her-father-did/#31650c296668
Artificial Intelligence in Education 21

Although artificial neural networks have been trained to do some

incredible things (such as identifying faces in moving crowds of people),
they remain primitive in comparison to higher-order animal brains.
Unlike for example the human brain’s billions of neurons, they usually
involve only a few thousand neurons (in some exceptional cases, a few
million).
As illustrated in the following figure, artificial neural networks each
comprise three types of layers: an input layer that takes stimuli from the
environment, in the form of millions of data points, perhaps pixels from
images; at least one, but often many more, hidden intermediary layers
that together undertake the computation; and an output layer that
delivers the result. During the machine learning process, weightings given
to the connections are adjusted in a process of reinforcement learning,
which allows the artificial neural network subsequently to compute
outputs for new stimuli.

A representation of a typical, simple artificial neural network,

with two hidden layers.

The hidden layers are the key to the power of artificial neural
networks, but they also bring an important problem. It isn’t possible (or
at the very least it isn’t easy) to interrogate an artificial neural network to
find out how it came up with its solution—for example, how did it
identify a particular person in a photograph? In other words, artificial
neural networks can lead to decision making for which the rationale is

© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved

22 Artificial Intelligence in Education

hidden and unknowable, or un-inspectable, and possibly unjust,66 a

critical issue that is the subject of much research.67
Finally, the impressive results of neural networks and other machine
learning technologies should not beguile us:
A neural network of today no more “learns” or “reasons”
about the world than a linear regression of the past. They
merely induce patterns through statistics. Those patterns
may be opaquer, more mediated and more automatic than
historical approaches and capable of representing more
complex statistical phenomena, but they are still merely
mathematical incarnations, not intelligent entities, no
matter how spectacular their results.68

66 O’Neil, C. (2017). Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.
Penguin.
67 Morcos, A.S., et al. (2018). “On the importance of single directions for generalization.” ArXiv:1803.06959.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1803.06959
68 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2018/12/15/does-ai-truly-learn-and-why-we-need-to-stop-

overhyping-deep-learning/#edd206168c02
Artificial Intelligence in Education 23

How AI Works in Education

Having established a working understanding of AI, we will now look in
more detail at how AI works in educational contexts, beginning with a
brief history. However, what will not be discussed but what might
nonetheless have a major impact on education is the use of AI to support
school administration (system-facing AI that addresses things like class
timetabling, staff scheduling, facilities management, finances,
cybersecurity, safety and security).69 Our focus is the use of AI to support
learning (student- and teacher-facing AI).
A Brief History of AI in Education
Precursors of the application of AI in education can be found in the
work of the psychologists Sidney Pressey, who was a professor at Ohio
State University in the 1920s, and B. F. Skinner, known as the father of
behaviorism, who was a professor at Harvard University from 1948 until
his retirement in 1974. For Pressey, the challenge was to leverage the
potential of multiple-choice tests to consolidate student learning as well
as to evaluate it. Drawing on Edward Thorndike’s law of effect,70 he
argued that, for tests to support learning, immediate feedback was
essential—which is not usually possible when tests are marked by hand.
However, a mechanical approach could ensure that no learning
opportunities were missed.
Devices which at once inform a student about the
correctness of his answer to a question, and then lead him
to the right answer, clearly do more than test him; they
also teach him.71

69 Readers who are interested in the use of AI technologies to support administrative functions might like to
read about Ofsted, the UK’s school inspection service. Ofsted’s use of “artificial-intelligence algorithm to
predict which schools are 'less than good'.” https://www.tes.com/news/ofsted-use-artificial-intelligence-
algorithm-predict-which-schools-are-less-good
70 Thorndike. E.L. (1927) “The Law of Effect.” The American Journal of Psychology 39 (1/4): 212–22.

https://doi.org/10.2307/1415413
71 Pressey, S.L. (1950). “Development and appraisal of devices providing immediate automatic scoring of

objective tests and concomitant self-instruction.” Journal of Psychology 30: 417–447.

© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved
24 Artificial Intelligence in Education

Pressey made various versions of his machine (and made several

unsuccessful attempts to commercialize his idea), the most sophisticated
being based on a mechanical typewriter. Inside this device was a rotating
drum around which was wrapped a card printed with a list of questions
and hole-punched (much like the perforated rolls used in self-playing
pianos) to represent the correct answers. Meanwhile, the casing featured
a small window, which showed the number of the current question, and
five typewriter keys, one for each possible answer. As the student worked
through a printed sheet of questions and answers, they would press one
of the keys on the device to select their answer for each question. The
machine was configured so that the student immediately knew whether
they had made the right choice, and it prevented them from moving onto
the next question until they had.
Interestingly, Pressey was also one of the first to make the case that, in
addition to supporting learning, a teaching machine could make a
teacher’s life easier and more fulfilling—by relieving them of one of their
least interesting tasks (marking tests) and giving them more time to
engage with their students.
Lift from [the teacher's] shoulders as much as possible of
this burden and make her [sic] free for those inspirational
and thought-stimulating activities which are, presumably,
the real function of the teacher.72
Pressey’s approach was later extended by Skinner, who argued that the
techniques he pioneered for training rats and pigeons (in operant
conditioning chambers now known as Skinner Boxes) might be adapted
for teaching people. Skinner’s teaching machine, which he devised in
1958, was a wooden box with a windowed lid. Questions written on
paper disks appeared in one window, and the student wrote a response
on a roll of paper accessible through a second window (for later marking
by a teacher). Advancing the mechanism automatically covered the

72 Pressey, S.L. (1926). “A simple device for teaching, testing, and research in learning.” School and Society 23:
374.
Artificial Intelligence in Education 25

student’s answer, so that it could not be changed, and simultaneously

revealed the correct answer. In this way, Skinner’s teaching machine
provided automatic, immediate reinforcement. Students were required to
compose their own answers, rather than choose from a limited selection
(as with Pressey’s multiple-choice questions), because Skinner found that
learning is more effectively reinforced by recalling a correct response
than by simply recognizing it. This approach also gave the student the
opportunity to compare their answer with the given model answer, which
if properly designed by the teacher and actively undertaken by the
student could also contribute to learning.
Skinner argued that his teaching machine in effect acted like a
personal tutor, foreshadowing AIED’s intelligent tutoring systems.
The machine itself, of course, does not teach ... but the
effect upon each student is surprisingly like that of a
private tutor.... (i) There is a constant interchange between
program and student.... (ii) Like a good tutor, the machine
insists that a given point be thoroughly understood ...
before the student moves on.... (iii) Like a good tutor, the
machine presents just that material for which the student is
ready.... (iv) Like a skillful tutor, the machine helps the
student to come up with the right answer.... (v) Lastly, of
course, the machine, like the private tutor, reinforces the
student for every correct response, using this immediate
feedback ... to shape his behavior most efficiently.73
Skinner’s teaching machine might be thought to have also
foreshadowed something else later taken up by AI in education
researchers, dividing automated teaching into separate components (in
Skinner’s case, distinguishing between the subject content, which was
pre-programmed into the machine, and the student’s achievements,
whether or not they answered a question correctly). However, although
in a sense Skinner’s teaching machine was responsive to individual
students, it could not be considered adaptive. That is to say, it did not
adapt either the questions, or the order in which they were presented,

73 Skinner, B.F. (1958). “Teaching machines.” Science 128 (3330): 969–77.

© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved
26 Artificial Intelligence in Education

according to the achievements or needs of the individual students.

Instead, question delivery was pre-scripted. While a student could
proceed at their own pace, they went through the same list of questions
as every other student and in the same order.
Adaptive Learning
Also working in the 1950s, Norman Crowder, who was interested in
communication rather than psychology, devised a paper-based alternative
to the early teaching machines, known as intrinsic or branching
programmed instruction.74 In Crowder’s system (which he developed for
training U.S. Air Force engineers to find malfunctions in electronic
equipment), the user is presented with a short page of information
followed by a multiple-choice question, with each possible answer
directing the student to a new page. If the correct answer was chosen, the
new page would present new information, building upon that which was
correctly understood; if an incorrect answer was chosen, the new page
would contain feedback designed to help the student understand the
cause of their error, based on what the student had chosen. The system
might also branch through one or two additional pages of corrective
materials before returning the student back to the main pages. In short,
Crowder’s system adapted the pathway through the teaching materials
according to the individual student’s developing knowledge, such that
each student might see quite different sets of pages.
However, a British polymath, Gordon Pask, probably developed the
first truly adaptive teaching machine in the early 1950s. Known as SAKI
(the self-adaptive keyboard instructor), it was designed for trainee
keyboard operators learning how to use a device that punched holes in
cards for data processing.75 What distinguished SAKI from the other
early teaching machines was that the task presented to a learner was

74 Crowder, N.C. (1960). “Automatic tutoring by means of intrinsic programming.” In Teaching Machines and
Programmed Learning: A Source Book. Vol. 116. Lumsdaine, A.A., and Glaser, R. (eds.) American Psychological
Association, 286–298.
75 Pask, G. (1982). “SAKI: Twenty-five years of adaptive training into the microprocessor era.” International

Journal of Man-Machine Studies 17 (1): 69–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0020-7373(82)80009-6

Artificial Intelligence in Education 27

adapted to the learner’s individual performance, which was represented

in a continuously changing probabilistic student model.
When you interact with the system, learning which keys represent
which numbers:
the machine is measuring your responses, and building its
own probabilistic model of your learning process. That
“7,” for instance, you now go to straight away. But the
“3,” for some obscure reason, always seems to elude you.
The machine has detected this, and has built the facts into
its model. And now, the outcome is being fed back to you.
Numbers with which you have difficulty come up with
increasing frequency in the otherwise random presentation
of digits. They come up more slowly, too, as if to say:
“Now take your time.” The numbers you find easy, on the
contrary, come up much faster: the speed with which each
number is thrown at you is a function of the state of your
learning.76
Computer-Aided Instruction
SAKI went through many iterations, taking advantage of developments
in computers and the new microprocessors, and was one of the first
adaptive systems to be commercialized. However, over the following
years, other than in the various iterations of SAKI, adaptive learning
made few advances, and the focus shifted to what became known as
computer-aided instruction (CAI) systems. The 1960s and 1970s saw
many CAI systems being built, an early influential example being PLATO
(programmed logic for automatic teaching operations), which was
developed at the University of Illinois. PLATO involved students
accessing standard teaching materials, some of which were interactive, on
a central mainframe computer via remote terminals, with as many as a
thousand students working at the same time.
This system was also notable for being the first to introduce in an
educational technology many tools and approaches still common today,
such as user forums, email, instant messaging, remote screen-sharing, and

76 Beer, S. (1960). Cybernetics and Management. The English Universities Press, 124.
© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved
28 Artificial Intelligence in Education

multiplayer games. Around the same time, Stanford University and IBM
developed a computer-aided instruction system that was made available
via remote terminals to a few local elementary schools. This system
involved a linear presentation of teaching materials, for mathematics and
language arts, together with drill and practice activities. A third
prominent example was TICCIT (time-shared interactive computer-
controlled information television), developed by Brigham Young
University, which was used to teach freshman-level mathematics,
chemistry, physics, English, and various language courses. Each subject
area was broken down into topics and learning objectives, which in turn
were represented as screens of information. TICCIT then provided a
predetermined sequence, although learners could also use the keyboard
to navigate through the screens in any order that they found helpful.
Although in other ways successful, during the 1960s and 1970s only
very few of these CAI systems were widely adopted, mainly due to the
cost and accessibility of the university mainframes that were needed to
host the software. The arrival of personal computers in the 1980s
changed everything, with the number of CAI programs quickly
mushrooming. Very soon, CAI programs addressing every aspect of
learning were being widely used in schools, universities and family
homes. Nonetheless, of particular relevance for our present purposes,
almost all of these systems were severely hampered by the same flaw—a
lack of adaptivity. The sequence of topics, the information provided, and
the system’s response to student actions, were predefined and the same
for each student, ignoring the individual student’s successes,
misconceptions, and interests, and thus inhibiting their potential learning.
AI and CAI
At around the same time that mainstream CAI was developing, other
researchers, such as John Self77 and William Clancey,78 were wondering

77 Self,
J.A. (1974). “Student models in computer-aided instruction.” International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 6
(2): 261–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0020-7373(74)80005-2
78 Clancey, W.J. (1983). “GUIDON.” Journal of Computer-Based Instruction 10 (1–2 ): 8–15.
Artificial Intelligence in Education 29

how CAI could become adaptive to the needs of individual students, and
whether the application of techniques from AI might be useful. The first
implementation of AI techniques in computer-aided instruction is usually
credited to Jaime Carbonell, who, in his 1970 PhD thesis, introduced a
system called SCHOLAR. This novel system was designed to enable a
student to review their knowledge of the geography of South America, by
means of a dialogue using a subset of English. SCHOLAR was
qualitatively different from standard CAI because, unique for the time, it
was capable of generating individual responses to student statements by
drawing from a semantic network (a way of representing knowledge, in
this case knowledge of geography, in which concepts are linked
according to their semantic relationships).
In [a] conventional CAI, the database consists of many
“frames” of specific pieces of text, questions, and
anticipated answers entered in advance by the teacher. By
contrast, [SCHOLAR] is based on the utilization of an
information network of facts, concepts, and procedures; it
can generate text, questions, and corresponding answers.
Because [it] can also utilize its information network to
answer questions formulated by the student, a mixed-
initiative dialogue between student and computer is
possible with questions and answers from both sides.79
A SCHOLAR dialogue80 might look something like this:
SCHOLAR: Use one of the following: Sucre, French,
Argentina, Spanish, to answer the question: What is the
language in Chile?
SCHOLAR: You are taking too much time...
Student: *Spanich*
SCHOLAR: You should have written “Spanish.” Very
good.
Although by today’s standards the dialogue (and especially its
pedagogy) appears primitive, SCHOLAR is usually considered to be the

79 Carbonell, J. R. (1970). “AI in CAI: An Artificial-Intelligence Approach to Computer-Assisted Instruction.”

IEEE Transactions on Man-Machine Systems 11 (4): 190–202. https://doi.org/10.1109/TMMS.1970.299942
80 Carbonell, “AI in CAI,” 192.

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30 Artificial Intelligence in Education

first example of what came to be known as Intelligent Tutoring Systems,

to which we turn next.
Artificial Intelligence in Education 31

Applications of AI in Education
Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Under the best learning conditions we can devise
(tutoring), the average student is two sigma above the
average control student taught under conventional group
methods of instruction. The tutoring process demonstrates
that most of the students do have the potential to reach
this high level of learning. I believe an important task of
research and instruction is to seek ways of accomplishing
this under more practical and realistic conditions than the
one-to-one tutoring, which is too costly for most societies
to bear on a large scale. This is the 2 sigma problem.81
So-called intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) are among the most common
applications of AI in education (in any case, as we have seen, they have
probably been around the longest). Generally speaking, ITS provide step-
by-step tutorials, individualized for each student, through topics in well-
defined structured subjects such as mathematics or physics.82 Drawing on
expert knowledge about the subject and about pedagogy, and in response
to individual student’s misconceptions and successes, the system
determines an optimal step-by-step pathway through the learning
materials and activities. As the student proceeds, the system automatically
adjusts the level of difficulty and provides hints or guidance, all of which
aim to ensure that the student is able to learn the given topic effectively.
ITS come in many shapes, although typically they involve several AI
models, an approach that we will unpack here. As we saw in our earlier
discussion of AI technologies, AI models are highly simplified
computational representations (in semantic networks, as used by

81 Bloom, Benjamin S. (1984). ‘The 2 Sigma problem: The search for methods of group instruction as effective
as one-to-one tutoring.” Educational Researcher 13 (6): 4. Note, however, that according to VanLehn, “human
tutors are 0.79 sigma more effective than no tutoring and not the 2.0 sigma found in the Bloom (1984)
studies” VanLehn, K. (2011.) “The relative effectiveness of human tutoring, intelligent tutoring systems, and
other tutoring systems.” Educational Psychologist 46 (4): 209. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2011.611369
82 Alkhatlan, A. and Kalita, J. (2018). “Intelligent tutoring systems: A comprehensive historical survey with

recent developments.” ArXiv:1812.09628. http://arxiv.org/abs/1812.09628

© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved
32 Artificial Intelligence in Education

SCHOLAR, in ontologies,83 or in knowledge graphs)84 of specific

knowledge about the real world (just like a model car is a simplified
representation of a real car). The models used by ITS represent
knowledge specific to teaching and learning. Typically, knowledge about
the topic to be learned is represented in what is known as a domain
model, knowledge about effective approaches to teaching is represented
in a pedagogical model, and knowledge about the student is represented
in a learner model.85 The ITS algorithm draws on these three models in
order to adapt a sequence of learning activities for each individual
student. A fourth model found in some ITS is the open learner model, to
which we will return later.
The Domain Model
A domain model represents knowledge about the subject that the ITS
aims to help the students learn (much like the subject knowledge in a
standard, non-educational, expert system). This might, for example, be
knowledge about mathematical procedures, genetic inheritance, or the
causes of World War I. In fact, over the years, mathematics for primary
and secondary school students has dominated ITS. Mathematics, along
with physics and computer science, are AIED’s low-hanging fruits
because they are, at least at a basic level, well-structured and clearly
defined.
The Pedagogy Model
The ITS pedagogy model represents knowledge about effective
approaches to teaching and learning that have been elicited from teaching
experts and from research in the learning sciences (although it should be

83 Ontologies are a way of representing a domain’s concepts, data, components, entities and properties, and
the relationships between them. Sowa, J.F. (1995). “Top-level ontological categories.” International Journal of
Human-Computer Studies 43 (5): 669–85. https://doi.org/10.1006/ijhc.1995.1068
84 Knowledge graphs are an alternative approach to ontologies,

https://ontotext.com/knowledgehub/fundamentals/what-is-a-knowledge-graph
85 Luckin, R., et al. (2018). Intelligence Unleashed. An Argument for AI in Education, 18; Boulay, B. du.,

Poulovassilis, A., Holmes, W., and Mavrikis, M. (2018). “What does the research say about how artificial
intelligence and big data can close the achievement gap?” 4. In Luckin, R. (ed.) (2018). Enhancing Learning and
Teaching with Technology, 316–27. Institute of Education Press.
Artificial Intelligence in Education 33

acknowledged that some ITS developers falsely assume that they have
sufficient expertise in pedagogy).86 Pedagogical knowledge that has been
represented in many ITS include knowledge of instructional
approaches,87 the zone of proximal development,88 interleaved practice,89
cognitive load,90 and formative feedback.91 For example, a pedagogical
model that implements Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development will
ensure that activities provided by the system to the student are neither
too easy nor too challenging, one that implements individualized
formative feedback will ensure that feedback is provided to the student
whenever it might support the student’s learning.
The Learner Model
As we have seen, some CAI effectively (although usually by another
name) implemented versions of both domain and pedagogical models:
knowledge of what was to be learned and knowledge of how to teach
what was to be learned (for example, using linear or branching
programmed instruction). However, what distinguishes AI-driven ITSs is
that, as foreshadowed by Pask’s SAKI, they also include a learner model:
“a representation of the hypothesized knowledge state of the student.”92
In fact, many ITS incorporate a wide range of knowledge about the
student—such as their interactions, material that has challenged the

86 For example, many ITS set out to address student “learning styles” (Kumar, Amit, Ninni Singh, and Neelu
Jyothi Ahuja. (2017). “Learning-styles based adaptive intelligent tutoring systems: Document analysis of
articles published between 2001 and 2016.” International Journal of Cognitive Research in Science, Engineering and
Education 5 (2): 83–98. https://doi.org/10.5937/IJCRSEE1702083K This construct that has been widely
discredited, e.g., Kirschner, P.A. (2017). “Stop propagating the learning styles myth.” Computers & Education
106: 166–171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2016.12.006
87 Bereiter, C. and Scardamalia, M. (1989). “Intentional learning as a goal of instruction.” Knowing, Learning, and

Instruction: Essays in Honor of Robert Glaser, 361–392.

88 Vygotsky, Mind in Society, 86ff.

89 Rohrer, D., and Taylor, K. (2007). “The shuffling of mathematics problems improves learning.” Instructional

Science 35 (6): 481–98. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-007-9015-8

90 Mayer, R.E. and Moreno, R. (2003). ‘”Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning.”

Educational Psychologist 38 (1): 43–52.

91 Shute, V.J. (2008). “Focus on formative feedback.” Review of Educational Research 78 (1): 153–89.

https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654307313795
92 Self, J.A. (1974). “Student models in computer-aided instruction.” International Journal of Man–Machine Studies

6 (2), 261–276. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0020-7373(74)80005-2

© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved
34 Artificial Intelligence in Education

student, their misconceptions, and their emotional states while using the
system—all of which can be used to inform what is being taught and
how, together with what support needs to be provided and when. In fact,
most ITSs go much further. The knowledge stored about the individual
student is augmented with knowledge of all the students who have used
the system so far, from which the system machine learns in order to
predict which pedagogical approach and which domain knowledge is
appropriate for any particular student at any specific stage of their
learning. It is the learner model that enables ITS to be adaptive, and the
machine learning that makes this adaptivity especially powerful.
A Typical ITS Architecture
The following figure shows how the domain, pedagogy, and learner
models might be connected in a typical ITS.

A typical ITS architecture, including the pedagogy, domain, learner, and open-
learner models.
Artificial Intelligence in Education 35

About CCR
Redesigning Education Standards
The Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR) is an international convening
body and research center seeking to expand humanity’s potential and
improve collective prosperity by redesigning K–12 education standards
for the twenty-first century. In order to create a comprehensive set of
frameworks, CCR brings together constituencies with diverse points of
view—international organizations, jurisdictions, academic institutions,
corporations, and nonprofit organizations including foundations—to
consider and respond to the question: “What should students learn for
the twenty-first century?”
The Center’s Guiding Principles
A sustainable humanity—one in which collective potential is expanded,
and collective prosperity improved—is orchestrated out of multiple
social, economic, and environmental factors. Key among them: a relevant
education, based on meaningful curriculum, is critical to creating
sustainability, balance, and wellbeing.
While significant attention is being paid to teaching methods and
pedagogy, the CCR argues that the what of K–12 education is at least as
important as the how, and brings a singular focus to the what.
That twenty-first century what must take into account the accelerated
pace of change we are experiencing, and shifts in societal and personal
needs. Curriculum must be useful for the lives children will live and
adapted accordingly.
Our ability to contribute a meaningful WHAT requires openness to
different perspectives. Therefore, CCR avoids dogma and emphasizes
innovation and synthesis—multiple inputs applied and organized for
optimum clarity and impact.
We can—and will—shape the future we want.

© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved

36 Artificial Intelligence in Education

Focus on the What

Exponential changes in technology make specific predictions about the
future all the more unreliable, but one thing is certain: we must prepare
children to deal with greater complexity than ever before. The last major
curriculum reform occurred in the late 1800s, also in a time of rapidly
changing needs. Well into the twenty-first century, we can ill afford to
depend on a nineteenth century curriculum. Indeed, we cannot expect
our children to thrive unless we deeply examine, redesign and deliver a
curriculum consistent with twenty-first century needs—one that is
balanced and flexible. To thrive will mean to be adaptable, versatile and
wise.
In designing a curriculum framework around adaptability, versatility
and wisdom we accomplish two main goals:
• Enhance the chances of an individual’s personal and
professional success and fulfillment.
• Provide a common base of understanding and ability to
participate in society, for a sustainable humanity.
The Center’s Work
The Center for Curriculum Redesign is not a program or intervention.
The staff and CCR’s partners approach their work holistically, actively
engaging with policymakers, standard setters, curriculum and assessment
developers, school administrators, heads of schools, department heads,
key teachers, EdTech experts and other thought leaders and influencers
to develop a thorough understanding of the needs and challenges of all
education stakeholders. This is essential to creating the vision of
meaningful, relevant twenty-first century education, and to enabling
practical implementation.
The organization’s research, findings and recommendations are
actively disseminated through a wide variety of formats: CCR-sponsored
conferences and seminars, active web presence and social media,
consulting engagements and keynoting.
Artificial Intelligence in Education 37

The following video serves to summarize our views, and can be

shared freely: http://bit.ly/CCRintrovideo93

93 For the video on Vimeo, go to http://bit.ly/CCRintrovideovimeo

© Center for Curriculum Redesign – All Rights Reserved