Purpose: Research demonstrates that many elementary school students are not learning foundational competencies in STEM. Through prior ED/IES SBIR, IES, and projects funded through other government programs, the team developed and evaluated InqITS, an on-line science laboratory that employs Artificial Intelligence for students to conduct virtual experiments and receive feedback to inform learning and instruction in real time. The project team will develop a new component of InqITS, a prototype lab to integrate writing within science experiments to extend how elementary students learn STEM.

Project Activities: In Phase I, the project team will develop prototype labs that automatically score elementary students' science writing through natural language processing scoring algorithms, as well as an educator dashboard with information on student progress. At the end of Phase I, a pilot study will include 5 grade 3 to 5 educators with 25 students per class. The researchers will examine if the prototype functions as intended, if educators are able to use the labs in classrooms with their students, if the system can accommodate for a range of students' written responses across different competencies, and how well students in grades 4 and 5 rate using the prototype to support writing in the context of STEM.

Related IES Projects: ASSISTment Meets Science Learning (AMSL) (R305A090170); The Development of an Intelligent Pedagogical Agent for Physical Science Inquiry Driven by Educational Data Mining (R305A120778); Inq-Blotter: Revolutionizing How Teachers Identify and Support Students Needing Help During Inquiry (ED-IES-15C0018); Recognizing How Teachers Identify and Support Students Needing Help During Inquiry (ED-IES-16C0014)

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