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As students across the U.S. enter their first full school year with access to powerful AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard, many educators remain skeptical of their usefulness 鈥� and preoccupied with their potential to .

But this fall, a few educators are quietly charting a different course they believe could change everything: At least two groups are pushing to create new AI chatbots that would offer teachers unlimited access to sometimes confusing and often paywalled peer-reviewed research on the topics that most bedevil them. 

Their aspiration is to offer new tools that are more focused and helpful than wide-ranging ones like ChatGPT, which tends to stumble over research questions with competing findings. And like many kids faced with questions they can’t answer, it has a frustrating tendency to make things up.

Tapping into curated research bases and filtering out lousy results would also make the bots more reliable: If all goes according to plans, they鈥檇 cite their sources.

The result, supporters say, could revolutionize education. If their work takes hold, millions of teachers for the first time could routinely access high-quality research and make it part of their everyday workflow. Such tools could also help stamp out adherence to stubborn but ill-supported fads in areas from 鈥渓earning styles鈥� to reading instruction.

So far, the two groups are each feeling their way around the vast undertaking, with slightly different approaches.

In June, the International Society for Technology in Education introduced , a tool built on content vetted by ISTE and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. (The two groups merged in 2022.) ISTE has made it available in to selected users. All of the chatbot鈥檚 content is educator-focused, and it鈥檚 trained solely on materials developed or approved by the two organizations. 

Now its creators say that within about six months, they expect that the tool will also be able to scour outside, peer-reviewed education research and return 鈥減retty understandable, pretty meaningful results鈥� from vetted journals, said Richard Culatta, ISTE鈥檚 CEO.

鈥淭here’s this big gap between what we know in the research and what happens in practice,鈥� he said. One reason: Most research is published in a format that 鈥渋s just totally inaccessible to teachers.鈥�

Case in point: A set of by the Jefferson Education Exchange, a nonprofit supported by the University of Virginia鈥檚 Curry School of Education, found that while educators prefer research they can act on 鈥� and that鈥檚 presented in a way that applies to their work 鈥� only about 16% of teachers actually use research to inform instruction.

So he and others are building a digital tool, 鈥減urpose-built for educators by educators,鈥� that can translate research into practice, using 鈥渧ery practical language that teachers understand.鈥�

For instance, a teacher could ask the chatbot, 鈥淲hat does the research say about creating a healthy school culture?鈥� or 鈥淲hat鈥檚 the evidence for teaching phonics to developing readers?鈥� One could also ask it to suggest activities that are appropriate for middle school students learning about digital citizenship.

Joseph South, ISTE鈥檚 chief learning officer, said teachers want the latest research, but are up against formidable obstacles. 鈥淭hey have to find the article in the journal that happens to relate to the thing that they want to do,鈥� he said. 鈥淭hey have to somehow understand academic-speak. They have to have the time to read this, and they have to translate it into something useful.鈥�

While ChatGPT can comb through journals it has access to, translate and summarize the research, he said, it鈥檚 not reliable. The typical chatbot 鈥� and thus the typical end user 鈥� doesn’t know whether the results are from a credible, peer-reviewed journal or not, and it may not necessarily care.

鈥淲e do, though,鈥� he said. 鈥淪o we can do that filtering and let the AI do its magic.鈥�

As with its beta version, the new chatbot will also cite the sources used to generate each response. And it鈥檒l let users know when it simply doesn鈥檛 have enough information to return a reliable response.

Developers are still in the early stages of deciding what academic journals to include. For now, they鈥檙e experimenting with a handful of key research articles, but will expand the chatbot鈥檚 range if initial prototypes prove helpful to educators.

Culatta and South, both veterans of the U.S. Department of Education, have spent years working on the research-to-practice problem, offering, in effect, translation services for research findings. 鈥淲e’ve spent so much work trying to figure out how to do it and it’s just never really worked,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t’s just always been a struggle. And we actually think that this could be the first for-real, sustainable, scalable approach to taking research and getting it into language that actually could be used by teachers.鈥�

, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and a well-known translator of education research, said his limited experience with ChatGPT has shown that when asked about a subject where there鈥檚 general consensus, such as “What is the effect of sleep on memory?” it produces helpful results. But it isn鈥檛 very good at synthesizing conflicting findings.

It鈥檚 also inconsistent in its willingness to reveal, in Willingham鈥檚 words, that 鈥溾�業 really don’t know anything about that.鈥� And so it, you know, just .鈥�

A paid ChatGPT subscriber, Willingham said he gets 鈥渞eally useful鈥� results only about 20% of the time. 鈥淏ut it requires plenty of verification on my part. And this is all within my area of expertise, so it’s not very hard for me to verify.鈥�

Tapping 鈥榃hat Works鈥�

ISTE isn鈥檛 the only organization pushing to make education research more widely accessible via chatbot. The Learning Agency, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm, is also testing a of a bot designed to offer answers to education research queries.

Unlike ISTE鈥檚, the agency鈥檚 tool taps an already existing, if finite, resource: the U.S. Department of Education鈥檚 What Works Clearinghouse, or more specifically its , a curated collection of materials developed by the department鈥檚 Institute of Education Sciences.

鈥淲e were inspired to basically create a special version of ChatGPT that was exposed to more high-quality educational data and research evidence on what works,鈥� said Perpetual Baffour, the group鈥檚 research director.

In a sense, she said, much of the work had already been done, since the library, though limited, exists to translate research findings into more digestible forms for educators. The result is a prototype that offers what Baffour calls 鈥渆vidence-based education advice鈥� on topics from adolescent literacy to dropout prevention and school turnarounds.

Baffour noted that the app development tool allowed the agency to create a 鈥渟imple but robust鈥� prototype within a day.

At the moment, the version they鈥檙e testing is 鈥渧ery basic,鈥� Baffour said. The agency is still considering what it鈥檒l look like in the future. 

鈥淚t only knows as much as the Doing What Works Library tells it,鈥� she said. So queries about topics that are in the library return rich results. But asking it about topics that aren鈥檛 can be problematic. 

For example, ask it about myths around the aforementioned learning styles and it defaults to a more general knowledge base scraped from Wikipedia articles, transcripts of recorded conversations and materials from 鈥渄ifferent corners of the Internet,鈥� Baffour said. 鈥淎nd as you can imagine, those sources might not have the most up-to-date and accurate information about education,鈥� Baffour said.

Indeed, a query about the topic returns this: 鈥淭he myth concerning learning styles is that there is one specific style that works best for everyone. This is not true, as different people learn in different ways and have different preferences for how they learn. Additionally, there is no evidence that suggests that focusing on one particular learning style is more effective than focusing on multiple styles.鈥�

Not exactly accurate or helpful.

In the first place, the widely believed 鈥渕yth鈥� holds that people with different learning styles learn best when their preferred mode of learning is indulged 鈥� not that one style works best for everyone. At a more basic level, while many people may express preferences for ways to take in new information and study 鈥� receiving instruction verbally, for example, instead of via pictures 鈥� scientists have yet to find good evidence that material tuned to these preferences . 

Unfortunately, at the moment the agency鈥檚 bot doesn鈥檛 confess whether it knows a lot or little about a topic. Baffour said they want to change that soon. For now, however, that鈥檚 just an aspiration.

鈥淚 think you’re more likely to get a confident chatbot producing inaccurate information than you are to get a self-aware chatbot admitting its false and incomplete knowledge,鈥� she said. 

Willingham, the UVA researcher, said a useful education-focused chatbot would not just have to incorporate reliable findings, but put them in context. For example, an answer to a query about the evidence for phonics instruction would properly note that, while the record is fairly strong, a lot of mediocre research and 鈥渉yperbolic claims鈥� made in support of alternative methods serve to cloud the overall picture 鈥� a delicate but accurate detail.

鈥淗ow is an aggregator going to negotiate that?鈥� he said. 

Asked if he thought a chatbot might soon replace him, Willingham, the author of and a that translate learning science into plain English, said he wouldn鈥檛 make any predictions. 

鈥淚 was never much of a futurist, but I hocked my crystal ball 15 years ago,鈥� he said.

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