LearnLens: An AI-Enhanced Dashboard to Support Teachers in Open-Ended Classrooms
This addresses the problem for middle school science teachers in open-ended classrooms, but it is incremental as it builds on existing dashboard and AI methods for educational support.
The paper tackles the challenge of teachers gaining timely insights into students' conceptual understanding in exploratory learning environments by presenting LearnLens, an AI-enhanced dashboard that processes open-ended responses to provide insights like summaries and visualizations, with teacher interviews indicating usability and instructional guidance potential.
Exploratory learning environments (ELEs), such as simulation-based platforms and open-ended science curricula, promote hands-on exploration and problem-solving but make it difficult for teachers to gain timely insights into students' conceptual understanding. This paper presents LearnLens, a generative AI (GenAI)-enhanced teacher-facing dashboard designed to support problem-based instruction in middle school science. LearnLens processes students' open-ended responses from digital assessments to provide various insights, including sample responses, word clouds, bar charts, and AI-generated summaries. These features elucidate students' thinking, enabling teachers to adjust their instruction based on emerging patterns of understanding. The dashboard was informed by teacher input during professional development sessions and implemented within a middle school Earth science curriculum. We report insights from teacher interviews that highlight the dashboard's usability and potential to guide teachers' instruction in the classroom.