SBIR Phase I: Mia Learning Independent Reading Choice Support System

SBIR第一期：Mia Learning自主阅读选择支持系统

• 批准号: 1747043
• 负责人: Darren Cambridge
• 金额: $ 22.5万
• 依托单位: Mia Learning LLC
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-01-01 至 2019-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1747043&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; Mia; Learning; Independent

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will build children's motivation to read and help them access books best suited to their individual interests, purposes, and abilities. Even though robust research demonstrates both intrinsic motivation to read and print book ownership strongly shape reading achievement, few existing educational software products address them. The project will develop a voice chatbot app elementary students will use in class to receive personalized book recommendations and coaching on choosing well. An associated book subscription service will allow kids to own books they choose, including in very low income schools through partnerships with non-profits. Together, these offerings will tap a combined U.S. children's book and literacy educational software market for grades 2-5 that tops $1.4 billion dollars annually. Unlike most other "personalized" or "adaptive" learning systems, the app will use machine learning and artificial intelligence to increase the agency of students and teachers. It will focus on helping students improve their ability to make their own choices rather than making those choices for them. The intellectual merit of this project lies in its innovative combination of a recommender system and a pedagogical agent to simultaneously assist students in completing an authentic task (choosing books to read independently) quickly and well while also teaching them to complete the task increasingly effectively and independently over multiple performances. The voice conversational interface will provide this combined task support and coaching through an emotionally engaging narrative experience accessible to struggling readers. The research will yield a field-tested prototype of the system, constructing a domain model, authoring conversational content, developing machine learning technology, and iteratively improving the system through usability and pilot testing in elementary school classrooms. Technical challenges include tuning automated voice recognition in naturalistic classroom environments, overcoming the cold start problem to generate high quality initial recommendations, and supporting acquisition of both cognitive and metacognitive skills within an ill-structured domain where measurement of successful performance has complex dependencies with student identity and social context.

这个小企业创新研究第一阶段的项目将建立孩子们的阅读动机，并帮助他们获得最适合他们个人兴趣、目的和能力的书籍。尽管强有力的研究表明，阅读和印刷图书所有权的内在动机都强烈地影响着阅读成就，但很少有现有的教育软件产品能够解决它们。该项目将开发一个语音聊天机器人应用程序，小学生将在课堂上使用，以获得个性化的书籍推荐和选择指导。相关的图书订阅服务将允许孩子们拥有自己选择的书籍，包括通过与非营利组织合作的低收入学校。这些产品加在一起，将打开美国2-5年级儿童图书和识字教育软件市场，这个市场每年超过14亿美元。与大多数其他“个性化”或“自适应”学习系统不同，该应用程序将使用机器学习和人工智能来增加学生和教师的代理。它将侧重于帮助学生提高自己做出选择的能力，而不是替他们做出选择。这个项目的智力优势在于它将推荐系统和教学代理创新地结合在一起，在帮助学生快速、出色地完成真实任务（选择独立阅读的书籍）的同时，也教会他们在多次表演中越来越有效、独立地完成任务。语音对话界面将通过情感上引人入胜的叙述体验，为挣扎的读者提供这种综合任务支持和指导。该研究将产生一个系统的现场测试原型，构建一个领域模型，编写会话内容，开发机器学习技术，并通过在小学教室的可用性和试点测试来迭代改进系统。技术挑战包括在自然课堂环境中调整自动语音识别，克服冷启动问题以产生高质量的初始建议，以及在结构不良的领域中支持认知和元认知技能的获得，在这种领域中，成功表现的衡量与学生身份和社会背景有着复杂的依赖关系。