New project to use AI to improve educational outcomes

Dong Wang
Dong Wang, Associate Professor
Nigel Bosch
Nigel Bosch, Assistant Professor

Students often have difficulty estimating how well they know a topic, which can lead to inefficient learning or suboptimal educational outcomes. A new project led by Associate Professor Dong Wang and Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch aims to improve students' ability to estimate their knowledge using artificial intelligence (AI) methods. The researchers were recently awarded a three-year, $850,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their project, "A Metacognitive Calibration Intervention Powered by Fair and Private Machine Learning."

"Students in college are often expected to do a considerable amount of studying and learning outside of class hours, especially in online courses, which requires a high degree of self-regulation and metacognitive knowledge to study effectively," said Bosch. "However, there are few opportunities for specifically learning self-regulation and metacognitive skills, especially early on in courses, while there is still time to improve studying skills in advance of major assessments (like finals)."

"While there is a rich set of research on AI methods in educational contexts, those efforts rarely consider some of the key social and human factors, such as privacy and fairness, that are needed for widespread adoption of personalized educational software," added Wang. "This project addresses these issues with a novel decentralized AI framework that is specifically for education contexts."

For their project, the researchers will utilize the predictive power of machine learning to anticipate how well undergraduate students will perform in a course. Then, they will teach the students to recognize their trajectory while there is still time to improve it.

"For example, we might find after a few weeks of a course that we can predict a student will probably get around a C+ on an upcoming test, whereas the student might think they are on track for an A," said Bosch. "We will provide students with some exercises to self-assess and improve their ability to estimate their own learning, so that they can better prioritize and motivate their studying strategies."

The AI systems being developed will not directly access student data, in order to reduce biases related to key aspects of students' identity. By improving AI "fairness" in this privacy-focused situation, information about students cannot be directly used to audit or adjust the models. According to the researchers, the privacy and fairness capabilities of the project framework will transform postsecondary online learning.

"This project will advance AI research by incorporating, for the first time, both a strict privacy guarantee for student data and fairness considerations across multiple student demographic groups," said Wang. "It will also advance education research by determining how effective preemptive feedback is for improving knowledge estimation skills and examining the mechanism by which this estimation influences academic outcomes."

Wang's research interests lie in the areas of human-centered AI, social sensing and intelligence, big data analytics, misinformation detection, and human cyber-physical systems. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Bosch holds a joint appointment in the Department of Educational Psychology in the College of Education. His research focuses primarily on machine learning and human-computer interaction applications in education. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Notre Dame.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Aubin Le Quéré to join the faculty

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Marianne Aubin Le Quéré will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2026, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Aubin Le Quéré is a PhD candidate in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University. For the 2025-2026 academic year, she will be a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.

Marianne Aubin Le Quere

Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub wins Synergy Award

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH) has won the Synergy Award from the Chicago Council on Science and Technology (C2ST). The MBDH is a partnership of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota. It is part of the National Science Foundation’s regional Big Data Innovation Hubs program that comprises offices in the Midwest, West, South, and the Northeast. 

Kelly Desino, scientific director of AbbVie's Community of Science, presenting the Synergy Award from the Chicago Council on Science and Technology (C2ST) to Professor Cathy Blake.

New project improves accessibility of health information through AI

Assistant Professor Yue Guo has received a $30,000 Arnold O. Beckman Research Award from the U of I Campus Research Board for her project, "Optimizing Personalization in Plain Language Summaries: Comparing Predictive and Interactive Approaches for Tailored Health Information." 

Yue Guo

Han defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Yingying Han successfully defended her dissertation, "Community Archives as Agency: Documenting Chinese American Experiences in the U.S.,” on May 28.

Yingying Han