It knew enough about medical diagnoses and literature to beat Jeopardy champions at their own game and has been put to use in cancer wards. Now, an IBM computer platform called Watson is taking on something really tough — teaching third-grade math.
For the past two years, the IBM Foundation has worked with teachers and their union, the American Federation of Teachers, to build Teacher Advisor, a program that uses artificial-intelligence technology to answer questions from educators and help them build personalized lesson plans.
By the end of the year, it will be available free to third-grade math teachers across the US, and will add subject areas and grade levels over time.
“The idea was to build a personal adviser, so a teacher would be able to find the best lesson and then customize the lesson based upon their classroom needs,” IBM Foundation president Stanley Litow said. “By loading a massive amount of content, of teaching strategies, lesson plans, you’d actually make Watson the teacher coach.”
The Watson technology began as a platform designed to answer questions, as it did on Jeopardy, but it has been broadened and adapted.
Oncologists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City have trained it to analyze research and a patient’s medical history to suggest potential treatment options to doctors. Watson for Oncology is now being used at more than 20 medical centers in Asia.
For teachers, one thing Watson will do is help them digest the US’ common core standards and incorporate them into daily lessons.
The standards are learning goals, a map of what students should be able to do at a given level. Third-graders should be able to measure area, for example, by counting out units, like square centimeters, but rather than just listing a group of skills, Watson serves up the prerequisites those skills are built upon and a set of exercises to break down the standard.
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said that one of the challenges of the common core standards has been that teachers are asked to teach math in a way they were never taught it themselves.
Watson, she said, should be able to help with that.
“We have moved from memorization and application of mathematical formulas to helping kids think it through,” Weingarten said. “If you don’t really, fundamentally understand that, it is root canal for an elementary-school teacher.”
About 200 teachers across the US, including about two dozen in New York City, have been part of a pilot program using Teacher Advisor.
Cara Madison, who is a special-education teacher at Nathanael Greene Elementary School in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, said the program has been a big time-saver for her because the information, compiled by teachers who are math experts, has already been vetted.
“You know whatever you pull is going to be engaging, is going to be effective,” Madison said.
The program can help design lessons for classrooms where students are performing at many different levels, she said, which is a constant challenge for teachers.
“If you are a third-grade math elementary-school teacher in New York City, you might have 60 percent of the kids in your class doing math at a second-grade level,” Litow said. “So a static lesson plan might not be helpful for you unless you can actually personalize it and customize it.”
Litow said that the program would not be complete when it is released later this year.
IBM expects to add more content areas and new features, and crucially, the more teachers use Watson, the more the system will learn — even about individual users.
However, while the program will get to know educators based on their lessons and searches, Litow said those queries would never be used to grade teachers.
“This is not going to be used for any other purpose,” Litow said. “There shouldn’t be any reason why a teacher would think: ‘I don’t want to go on Teacher Advisor because if I ask a dumb question, this is going to be held against me.’”
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