Let’s see if AI can work its magic to close education deficiencies

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It has been over two years since Generative AI first burst on the scene—and I have to say that I have grown increasingly frustrated with it. I jumped onto the artificial intelligence (AI) bandwagon long before ChatGPT was launched.

Two years on, after having tried virtually every new application and implementation, I am yet to find one I can rely on. I thought AI was going to do my research for me, write my articles and generally help me make sense of the world. Instead I find myself double-checking everything it sends—more often than not discarding its suggestions and starting from scratch.

We need AI to solve real-world problems that humans cannot. If it cannot, it will be just a passing fad. Just as I was about to give up on it entirely, I came across an application of AI in the education space that just might restore my faith in its promise.

But before I tell you all about it, I need to first explain the complex process of learning how to read. Children naturally develop the ability to speak—organically learning how to associate the sounds they hear spoken by the adults around them with the objects and actions that those words are meant to represent. They, however, need to be taught how to read.

In other words, they need active instruction on how to associate the sounds they already know with the squiggly symbols (alphabets) that we use to construct written words and sentences. Studies have shown that the ability of students to make sense of what they are being taught is directly correlated with the speed and accuracy with which they can read. We call such students fluent readers.