TeachFX receives award for voice AI tutoring technology
We’re thrilled to announce that TeachFX has been awarded a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to adapt our voice AI technology for the online tutoring context! We’re partnering with Cignition, a renowned provider of innovative, data-informed math tutoring programs, to implement our educator feedback tool with their tutors. This tutoring offering is being designed specifically to meet the needs of students who are Black, Latinx, and/or experiencing poverty. Given their focus on equity and data-driven decision making, Cignition feels like the perfect partner for this new initiative.
Serving tutors and their students is a natural move for TeachFX. Tutoring is known to be highly effective in improving learning outcomes, particularly for vulnerable students. However, providing high-quality, low-cost tutoring at scale is a challenge not easily solved. TeachFX technology can help address the quality, cost, and scalability challenges associated with tutoring:
Quality: Research shows that many of the same instructional practices TeachFX provides feedback on in a classroom setting also improve learning in one-on-one or small group tutoring contexts. For example, more student talk, in the form of self-explanation, is associated with greater learning gains among students receiving tutoring. Similarly, reducing tutor explanations and increasing the use of open-ended questions is associated with improved student performance on higher-order post-assessment questions. TeachFX provides targeted pedagogical feedback on elements of instruction, including session design, talk ratio, open-ended questioning and think time, including evidence-based resources and suggestions for incorporating more high-leverage instructional practices into sessions.
Cost: In a traditional K-12 setting, feedback to educators is usually delivered through observations by an instructional leader. These observers attend class and take notes in real time about what is said by the students and teacher and the dynamics of the classroom discourse, often transcribing exact dialogical exchanges and timing the duration of various elements of class. Classroom observers then review their notes, prepare written feedback, meet with the educator, and deliver the feedback. This process is valuable but very time-intensive, and as a result, it's done infrequently. When educators use TeachFX technology, they receive meaningful, frequent instructional feedback at a cost that is orders of magnitude lower than traditional methods, and instructional leaders have more time available to support students.
Scalability: By leveraging voice AI technology, TeachFX can provide infinitely scalable, meaningful feedback to educators to create more engaging, equitable learning experiences for students who need it the most.
This partnership will further TeachFX’s commitment to enabling high-quality instruction at scale, with a focus on equity. Our tutoring solution will be designed with the specific goal of improving middle school years math instruction for students who are Black, Latinx and/or experiencing poverty. During the pandemic, TeachFX launched no-cost partnerships with schools and districts around the country as part of our Equitable Classrooms initiative, resulting in an unprecedented compilation and analysis of more than 100,000 hours of classroom equity of voice data. The findings highlighted nationwide student engagement challenges in math and science instruction, during the middle school years, and among English learners and students with free or reduced-price lunch. These findings underscore the importance of improving middle years math instruction for priority students, and our team believes there is no more impactful area in which to focus our efforts right now.
Interested in learning more about TeachFX’s tutoring offering? Contact Cynthia McMurry (cynthia@teachfx.com).
