Correcting students' work with ai is often a hypothetical discussion in the US, but in India, Rocket Learning, a New Delhi-based childhood and edtech nonprofit, provides instant feedback on 50,000 worksheets per day. This helps provide guidance to some three million students under the age of six who would not otherwise receive it.
The ai grading tool provides feedback to students on the digital assignment; For example, in one exercise, students are given a worksheet with illustrations of various hands holding different numbers of fingers. They are asked to circle each hand that holds two fingers, using a digital drawing tool. The ai tool then corrects the work and informs them of the options they missed.
The assessment tool is part of the comprehensive early childhood learning program that Rocket Learning runs in partnership with more than 200,000 childcare centers across 10 states in India, bringing together teachers with small groups of parents who connect through communities in line. The goal of the program is to help parents teach their children early learning skills.
The ai grading tool was developed with the help of a $1.5 million Google.org grant, and as part of it, Google experts are helping Rocket Learning develop an ai tutor for the program that uses machine learning. In the meantime, there are many lessons for educators from the ai grading tool already deployed, says Vishal Sunil, CTO and co-founder of Rocket Learning.
<h2 id="ai-grading-perfect-accuracy-isn-t-necessarily-needed-3″>ai classification: perfect accuracy not necessary
In a way, a philosophy behind Rocket Learning's grading tool is to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The tool's accuracy ranges from approximately 90% to 95%, depending on the type of problem.
“It's no big deal if you make a mistake,” says Sunil. This is because informing the user that incorrect answers may occur is part of the experience. In fact, incorrect answers may even encourage more interactions between students and human educators. Sunil says users are told, “Hey, if you made a mistake, ask your teacher” or “Call this number.”
“That is also a participation tool in some aspects,” he adds.
A way to respond to more students
The implementation of the ai grading tool has dramatically increased the amount of feedback students receive. Earlier, less than 5% of the worksheets were graded, says Sunil. Now, with the help of the tool, all the work is answered instantly.
Not only does this help students learn in real time, Sunil says, but it has also led to greater utilization of the platform and more interaction among families who work with Rocket Learning. This tool is implemented alongside a set of tools that provide personalized problems for students and incorporate gamification.
“It's a high-involvement, stress-free way to get involved and assess where a child is at,” Sunil says.
Rocket Learning ai Worksheet Grading Tool It is open source and the nonprofit hopes to make the exercises available in English and other languages in the future.
Overall, Sunil believes that ai technology, particularly generative ai, has great potential to help low-income students and students in general. But to realize its full potential, he believes the educational field must be proactive rather than reactive.
“Education technology has been very, very timid about using generative ai; rather it has been affected by it, it has not been designed by us,” he says. “The entire educational landscape has been revolutionized by this.” However, this revolution has been involuntary and largely outside the control of educators.
Sunil believes that with the right design, educational technology can begin to lead this revolution instead of living it. “It is possible to protect yourself and create these generative experiences using LLM that could save a lot of time and human effort,” he says.
