Discussion – The role of AI in schools: the personalisation of learning and marking of student work
This content is an excerpt from a Digital Live: Evolving Education discussion on The role of AI in schools, hosted by Pearson.
This session explored the role of AI in schools, with a particular focus on its application for personalisation of learning, in marking and generating insight about student work.
The expert panel explored the positive impact this technology can have as well as addressing some of the key concerns educators may have. This session was chaired by Lucy Chowns, Senior Strategy Manager, Pearson UK Schools and is for teachers working in primary, secondary schools, and colleges.
We have now delivered over 5,000 exams with it. The key thing that it does that most people or teachers might not think is possible is mark every bit of working that a student does.
We are not replacing a traditional GCSE exam with a multiple choice or a simple drag and drop exam, we’re replacing it with the identical exam online.
The students complete the GCSE maths questions, in the way that they would on a written exam. They put all of their workings in, they can put in diagrams, they can draw as if they’re doing transformations or they can choose if it is a multiple-choice question such as in a AQA exam.
The thing that pleased me as we were developing it, is that the accuracy of the system, it’s 98.5% accurate compared to a human examiner.
There are two ways in which I think it makes a big difference:
One, is allowing students to take control of their learning and revision.
When I was a teacher of Year 11 students, the last two terms were mostly spent completing exams in some way or another. We would work through past papers, some of them in exam conditions, some of them together, some of them at home. Then I would mark those, give them feedback and we’d move on, that was the most effective way of learning for those students.
That is very time intensive for a teacher, and maybe the student does not want to wait a week for the teacher to be able to mark those and give them back.
One big advantage of Blutick is that a student can take an exam and they get instant feedback. They can immediately see and access a tailored course based on their performance in that exam. The questions that they have performed worse on the system will suggest those topics for them to practice, they then can repeat the process again independently to continue improving.
Two, for teachers it provides that crucial visibility of what students are doing.
Teachers can see every piece of work that students have entered and give students feedback from that. They don’t have to carry around any physical papers, they can simply log in and see every exam that the students have completed and go back to that whenever they want to.
Teachers receive a range of different summaries, either by student, so they can see in detail what the student needs to practice, or by class. They can see, for example, we really need to talk about simultaneous equations, because as a group you don’t know how to solve them or whatever it might be.
Teachers can tweak the marking, so students can still receive fully accurate marking from a teacher and teachers can get full visibility of what the students have entered.
The key point is the time saved is massive, because the vast majority of it has been marked already.
It is not complicated, it’s not difficult to set up, you simply create an exam session, the kids do the exams, and you get the results.
It is really powerful, both in terms of time savings for teachers, what the students can do independently and the feedback that both students and teachers receive.
Catch up: You can watch the entire discussion on YouTube here or sign up for future Pearson Digital Live Events here.
