Dive Brief:

• Dee Kanejiya, founder and CEO of AI ed tech provider Cognii, expects artificial intelligence to take on a bigger role in grading written answers, answering student questions, tutoring, hands-on learning and simulations this year.
• He writes for Venture Beat that ETS has already successfully used AI to replace one of the human graders of SAT and GRE essays, proving it can be trained to reliably and accurately analyze and grade student answers.
• Kanejiya also believes AI will play a role in formative assessment, asking students questions, evaluating their answers and providing feedback as a form of tutoring.

Dive Insight:

The New Media Consortium and the Consortium for School Networking produce annual Horizon Reports, identifying key trends in educational technology that are expected to achieve widespread adoption within five years. The 2016 report placed artificial intelligence at the outside of that adoption window.

Accurate AI grading of student written responses could be a valuable tool for improving assessments. Designers of standardized tests already weigh the value of essay questions against the cost of grading them. AI could remove much of the cost factor as a negative.