Cambridge Edition December 2019

EDUCAT ION SPOT L IGHT

Cen t ury Tec h HAILEYBURY SCHOOL IN HERTFORD TAKES A LOOK AT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE APPLICATIONS IN EDUCATION EDUCAT ION SPOTL IGHT

S an institution which seeks to innovate and improve our educational offering, we are delighted to be collaborating with Century Tech as one its flagship schools. The platform makes use of artificial intelligence (AI) to understand a pupil’s learning profile and then uses this information to present an individualised pathway which is made up of ‘learning nuggets’ that suit the pupil’s learning needs. It also produces rich data that indicates to the teacher the pupils’ strengths, weaknesses and next steps. Used with Years 7 to 11, the platform helps us understand pupils’ learning profiles and pathways and to offer lessons, mentoring and support in a more targeted, focused way. We have even heard of parents of pupils in Year 7 hosting ‘Century parties’: parents get together for dinner while the children work collaboratively through their pathways. It is really pushing our teaching staff to engage with academic data in a meaningful way. The information that comes through a pupil’s engagement with the platform is driving learning intentions in lessons, which allows teaching to be truly responsive. Historically, teachers have needed to draw out inferences of learning based on assessments, but Century draws out

largely focused on the formative: pupil X is quite good at this, so needs to complete a bit more of it, while pupil Y is very good at this, so should only do a small amount from time to time. The power clearly exists for the platform to gauge competency levels – but it is not yet programmed to do so through a nationally-recognised framework, such as grades or levels. At Haileybury, we are committed to supporting pupils to become intellectually curious and ambitious. In order to access the great conversations within subjects, they need to build up a complex body of knowledge. Century Tech supports them in doing so, which means more of our teaching time can be freed up to probe, analyse and critique this knowledge, drawing pupils into subject areas and enabling them to identify as learners. Haileybury School will host an open morning on 29 January (11+), an open morning on 14 March (11+ and 13+), an open morning on 13 May (11+), and an open evening on 18 June (16+).

those inferences for us. It can reliably let teachers know that a pupil is strong in a particular concept, for example sentence openings or converting decimals to fractions, based on their performance in a series of tasks over time. This removes the margin of error that can sometimes come with teacher judgement, assessment construction and progress. What we have seen already is an increased engagement with a greater level of personalised lesson planning and support as a consequence of this. If the technology is powerful enough to draw out such reliable inferences around pupil progress, there might be an opportunity to deploy it in the context of public examination and assessment – especially given the question marks around the unreliability of summative assessment. We are also interested in how Century might be enhanced or developed to provide summative information. Currently, the AI which drives Century is

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