Intelligent Learning Technologies: Applications of Artificial Intelligence to Contemporary and Emerging Educational Challenges

10 AI MAGAZINE Copyright © 2013, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved. ISSN 0738-4602 It is a time of remarkable transformation for education. Everyone recognizes the need to improve teacher effectiveness, to improve student engagement, and to create a twenty-first century education system that maximizes potential of every student. The challenges that must be addressed to make these improvements greatly exceed the scope of any single approach, whether it is educational technology, improved teacher training and better after school programs, and so on. In past research, AI — with its inextricable links to cognitive science, psychology, and mathematics — has proven a close fit for many of these challenging educational problems. Educators have long known that the most effective teaching method is one-on-one tutoring. Ever since Benjamin Bloom’s famous study,1 education researchers have aspired to mimic the holy grail of one-on-one tutoring — to achieve a two-sigma improvement in student learning. Early AI researchers saw this as an opportunity to build intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) that could adapt and tailor instruction to the individual needs of the student. Although today’s systems fall short of the full two-sigma effect of a human tutor (roughly equivalent to two grade levels), intelligent tutors have demonstrated remarkable progress in that direction. In fact, researchers have struggled to replicate the twosigma effect suggesting that ITSs may already be as effective as human tutors. This suggests that the contributions of AI to education are perhaps more profound than previously believed and leads us to wonder why AI-based learning techIntroduction to the Special Articles in the Fall and Winter Issues