KU researchers developing AI-boosted program to help teach writing skills to students with disabilities

LAWRENCE — Researchers at the University of Kansas are developing and expanding a program that will give teachers new capabilities powered by AI to help students with disabilities improve their writing skills with immediate scoring and feedback.

The research team at the Life Span Institute at KU received a five-year, $1.875 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Stepping Up competition to develop Project AI-SCORE, Artificial Intelligence Scored Composition to Improve Outcomes for Written Expression. The project will work with teachers and students with disabilities to spend more time practicing writing while using technology to give educators more ability to quickly score students’ writing samples and provide immediate feedback to help the students improve their abilities.

Students across Kansas — and the country — struggle to meet writing benchmarks. Writing is a critical skill to students’ academic and future successes. To improve student writing outcomes, teachers must read, score, provide feedback in a timely manner and connect areas of need to effective instruction.

“The challenge we’re trying to address is, as students write, assessing that with feedback in a timely and meaningful way is very difficult. Another challenge we face is just giving students a chance to write for writing’s sake,” said Sean Smith, professor of special education and principal investigator of the grant. “We know students are assessed on their math and science knowledge based on their writing abilities, but unfortunately we don’t spend adequate time teaching students the fundamentals of what good writing is and helping them improve their skills”.

Along with Smith, Bruce Frey, professor of educational psychology, and Samantha Goldman, doctoral candidate in special education, make up the KU-based team of Project AI-SCORE. In addition, they are collaborating with a broader team that includes national writing experts, school districts across the state of Kansas, families of students with disabilities and technologists to create innovative AI solutions for the writing process. The project will expand on the existing, web-based progress monitoring tool WRITE PM, Writing stRategies for Instructional Technology in Education – Progress Monitoring. The program has proven effective in helping teachers who work with students with learning disabilities improve writing skills with automatic scoring for quantitative elements of writing such as number of words, word sequence, spelling and number of letters.

AI-SCORE will build off the existing WRITE PM model and leverage AI to provide qualitative writing feedback, including ideas, organization and style. Additionally, the system will help teachers identify which instructional supports and technology tools best match each student’s areas of need.

The project is working to support collaboration between families and educators to improve writing outcomes. By engaging families and parents, researchers aim to strengthen the home-school partnership by providing tools and resources to help parents partner in their students' education. This allows students to apply writing feedback in their everyday environments, ensuring consistent support and fostering better writing development.

“Together, the essential elements of AI-SCORE, complemented with its supplementary resources to facilitate teacher/family supported student implementation, seeks to address the current gap in providing just-in-time, relevant and personalized student feedback coupled with suggested evidence-based practices for writing strategies to address the writing needs of students with learning disabilities,” Goldman said. “We’re excited for this opportunity to focus on providing meaningful feedback to students on their writing through the innovative use of AI.”

Researchers emphasized the AI capabilities will serve as a resource to help both students and teachers improve writing outcomes, rather than using the AI for producing generative writing for students or a way to replace the traditional instructional role of the teacher.

“The system will do the scoring, but the teacher will still do the teaching,” Goldman said. “Keeping the teacher in the loop is super important. The AI doesn’t have the pedagogy or the expertise to do what an educator does, but it will give them extra support.”

In the grant’s first year, researchers will develop the tools in AI-SCORE to provide teacher and student support. In subsequent years they will ramp up the project to begin use in schools across Kansas, then develop a tool that can be implemented in schools independent of the researchers and ensure AI-SCORE is sustainable beyond the life of the grant. Throughout the project, researchers will collect data on implementation, fidelity and learner outcomes.

“We know that if students get immediate feedback, they are more engaged. The evidence is there,” Smith said. “Our goal is to mimic student-teacher writing conferences with an embedded AI assistant for immediate student feedback.” 

Classroom educators, building leaders or district personnel who are interested in collaborating or learning more are encouraged to contact project personnel at aiscore@ku.edu.