AI Institute for Inclusive Intelligent Technologies for Education (INVITE)

INVITE seeks to fundamentally reframe how educational technologies interact with learners by developing artificial intelligence (AI) tools and approaches to support three crucial noncognitive skills known to enhance effective learning: persistence, academic resilience, and collaboration. This new generation of systems will be radically more responsive to learner needs, behaviors, and development and be designed to support the whole learner, beyond discipline-focused achievement. Use-inspired research focuses on computer science education, examining how students learn programming concepts, how they persist through challenging coding tasks, and how generative AI can provide scaffolding support while teachers promote noncognitive skill development. The resultant AI-based tools will be integrated into classrooms to empower teachers to support learners in more developmentally appropriate ways. This work will generate rich datasets documenting learners' interactions with educational technologies, programming environments, and teachers, allowing researchers to study learner growth over time and across different computer science learning activities. Research draws from partnerships with middle school computer science programs and utilizes platforms including block-based coding and pedagogical agent systems. Research and outreach activities leverage the INVITE partner network including schools, school districts, national organizations, and nonprofits. The Institute will offer programs to support students' participation in research experiences, undergraduate courses in AI in education, and professional development programs for teachers. Institute research will pursue foundational AI advances in robust and fair machine learning, learner modeling, natural language understanding, and generative AI applications for education to enable assessment and modeling of noncognitive skill development over time and across domains. It will revolve around three interconnected strands: (1) Collect, analyze, and share novel datasets for fair and robust machine learning and natural language understanding; (2) Build novel, robust methods for understanding learner behaviors and persistent, integrated learner models that incorporate assessments of noncognitive skills; (3) Develop new computer science learning environments that provide natural and adaptive interaction with pedagogical agents and intelligent scaffolding. Interpretable generative models fit to real data and simulated learners will enable new discoveries and hypotheses about human learning in programming contexts. Use-inspired research will advance the science of noncognitive skill acquisition during computer science learning and uncover relevant contextual aspects of learning historically overlooked by AI systems. The institute will serve as a nexus for building capacity for research, education, and expanded participation in the intersection of AI and computer science education, serving a wide array of stakeholders. Specifically, the Institute will (1) produce a database of multimodal datasets for use by other researchers, (2) provide open source tools and opportunities to develop knowledge about the use, control, and impact of innovative AI-enabled education systems, and (3) actively build a strong workforce of future scientists and engineers to design, implement, and deploy the next generation of AI-enabled Education for All systems. The National Center for Education Research at the Institute of Education Sciences of the US Department of Education is partnering with NSF to provide funding for the Institute. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.