{"id":98192,"date":"2026-04-06T17:52:54","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T21:52:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/?p=98192"},"modified":"2026-04-06T18:07:56","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T22:07:56","slug":"the-quest-to-build-a-better-ai-tutor-barshay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/2026\/04\/06\/the-quest-to-build-a-better-ai-tutor-barshay\/","title":{"rendered":"The quest to build a better AI tutor [Barshay]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The quest to build a better AI tutor<\/strong> <\/a>— from hechingerreport.org by Jill Barshay
\nResearchers make progress with an older ed tech idea: personalized practice<\/em><\/p>\n

One promising idea has less to do with how an AI tutor explains concepts and more with what it asks students to practice next.<\/p>\n

A team at the University of Pennsylvania, which included some AI skeptics, recently tested this approach in a\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0of close to 800 Taiwanese high school students learning Python programming. All the students used the same AI tutor, which was designed not to give away answers.<\/p>\n

But there was one key difference. Half the students were randomly assigned to a fixed sequence of practice problems, progressing from easy to hard. The other half received a personalized sequence with the AI tutor continuously adjusting the difficulty of each problem based on how the student was performing and interacting with the chatbot.<\/p>\n

The idea is based on what educators call the \u201czone of proximal development.\u201d When problems are too easy, students get bored. When they\u2019re too hard, students get frustrated. The goal is to keep students in a sweet spot: challenged, but not overwhelmed.<\/p>\n

The researchers found that students in the personalized group did better on a final exam than students in the fixed problem group. The difference was characterized as the equivalent of 6 to 9 months of additional schooling, an eye-catching claim for an after-school online course that lasted only five months.
\n<\/strong>…<\/strong><\/span>
\nTo address this, Chung\u2019s team combined a large language model with a separate machine-learning algorithm that analyzes how students interact with the online course platform \u2014 how they answer the practice questions, how many times they revise or edit their coding, and the quality of their conversations with the chatbot \u2014 and uses that information to decide which problem to serve up next.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The quest to build a better AI tutor — from hechingerreport.org by Jill Barshay Researchers make progress with an older ed tech idea: personalized practice One promising idea has less to do with how an AI tutor explains concepts and more with what it asks students to practice next. A team at the University of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[113,329,356,286,343,32,210,141,37,35,178,373,391,419,180,119,482,124,46,102,17,7,838,510,223,62,279,69,217,66,89,40,321,214],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-21st-century","category-24x7x365-access","category-artificial-intelligence-agents-llms-and-related","category-digital-learning","category-education","category-education-technology","category-emerging-technologies","category-engagement-engaging-students","category-future","category-game-changing-environment","category-generational-differences","category-homeschoolinghomeschoolers","category-human-computer-interaction-hci","category-ideas-teaching","category-innovation","category-instructional-design","category-intelligent-systems","category-intelligent-tutoring","category-k-12-related","category-learning","category-learning-agents","category-learning-ecosystem","category-learning-experience-design","category-learning-from-the-living-class-room","category-learning-theories","category-online-learning","category-participation","category-personalizedcustomized-learning","category-research","category-student-related","category-teachers","category-technologies-for-your-home","category-united-states","category-universities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98192"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98197,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98192\/revisions\/98197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}