Contract Closed

Personalized and Context-Relevant English Lessons with AI to Advance Workforce Opportunities

NCER

Program: Small Business Innovation Research

Award amount: $250,000

Project director: Victoria Pu

Awardee:

Linguistic Inc

Year: 2024

Award period: 8 months (05/01/2024 - 01/02/2025)

Project type:

Phase I Development

Contract number: 91990024C0013

Purpose

In this project, the team will develop a new artificial intelligence (AI) component to personalize content provided to adult students. For adult English learners (ELs) who have immigrated to the United States, many educators and researchers express concern over a gap between academic skills acquired through classroom instruction and what is needed for higher education or he workforce. Through prior R&D, the company developed a prototype of PACE AI, a program for educators to upload any content (for example, occupational training manual PDFs, custom worksheets, news articles) to create and an interactive learning experience for adults who are EL students.

Project Activities

The project team will develop new AI component to be integrated into the PACE AI program, including AI that tailors exercises to students at different levels, a portal for educators to upload content, an intake survey to gather key information on EL proficiency, and a user-interface that presents students personalized content from different sources. At the end of Phase I, the project team will conduct a pilot study with 10 educators and 30 adult EL students over a period of 2 weeks. They will examine the if the prototype functions as proposed, if students can successfully navigate the content that is presented in the user-interface, if educators can integrate the prototype into existing practices, and if students feel engaged and perceive that the final product would improve language acquisition.