Fostering students’ interest in learning has many positive downstream effects. It can make students more persistent and impact students’ career choices. Yet, motivating students is considered to be one of the greatest challenges in education.
With large class sizes, it can be difficult for teachers to focus on the learning conditions of each student. One impediment to fostering interest is the one-size-fits-all approach to educational materials. While this has had the crucial benefit of making education accessible to a large number of people, it can often fall short in engaging students. Since each student arrives with different prior knowledge and interests, some students may have trouble connecting with the materials and consequently lose interest in learning.
We are examining ways to apply Generative AI to create learning materials that are personalized to students' individual interests and skill levels. As an initial testbed, we are developing an app that enables students to learn new vocabulary words in conjunction with their interests.