AI Institute for Student AI Teaming

About This Grant

The renewal of the Institute for Student-AI Teaming will continue to directly address the urgent national need to develop a world-leading, next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) workforce. The Institute will pursue a transformative new vision for 21st century K-12 classrooms that uses AI to promote student success in STEM--where all students experience authentic learning by co-constructing knowledge, making discoveries through inquiry, and developing their interests. This work reframes the role of AI in education, pioneering a future where AI serves as a social, collaborative partner that helps students and teachers make learning more effective and engaging. The Institute will push the capabilities of AI to support small groups with knowledge sharing and uptake, collaboratively solving complex problems, and working through uncertainty and differences in ideas to engender "mental leaps" during STEM learning. The broad research agenda will focus on developing, testing, and scaling AI Partners and their integration in innovative STEM curricula supporting AI education through hands-on student-centered investigations. Research will be situated in authentic school contexts and developed in close partnerships with students, teachers, and school districts to examine the impacts of AI-enhanced pedagogies on learners' collaboration skills as well as their STEM knowledge and capabilities. A dedicated Nexus Hub will work with more than 25 organizations to amplify the Institute's translational impact--connecting research, education systems, and industry to accelerate innovation and workforce readiness. The Institute will advance the new science of student-AI teaming through foundational and use-inspired research contributions. Foundational advances in multimodal, multiparty, situated awareness in authentic classroom environments will yield AI models that can autonomously monitor unfolding collaborative discourse at multiple levels - understanding the content, the conversational dynamics, gestures, and other communicative signals - and learn optimal AI control strategies grounded in the learning sciences. New frameworks of trustworthy AI in education will support collaborative learning involving complex knowledge sharing and negotiations among learners, teachers, and AI Partners. These frameworks will extend beyond existing notions of privacy, security, and transparency to address relational privacy, longitudinal trust calibration, and humans-in-the-loop, empowering students with informed agency over their classroom AI. Co-design with educators and youth will produce a semester-long sequence of problem-based units designed to develop students' AI literacy, along with curriculum-linked professional learning that prepares educators to implement AI-enabled curricula with integrity. Case studies on school-wide implementations will develop deeper understanding of school practices and conditions that shape uptake and effective implementation of AI-enabled curricula. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.