Amira Learning And Istation Merge, Expanding K-12 AI Solutions
Jun 11, 2024,09:00am EDT
Amira Learning, the six-year-old provider of AI-driven personalized reading support, will join forces with Istation, a twenty-five-year veteran providing customized learning and assessment to K-12 students and educators. The merger marries an effective AI-driven tool with an established body of content and connections, bringing the benefits of Amira’s reading assistant quickly to a large number of students.
Reading Is More Than Fundamental
As the primary channel by which students can independently acquire new information, reading, more than anything, is the foundational skill for learning—hence its place of primacy among the three R’s. Reading transcends this role, however, as learning to read profoundly affects the underlying neurology of the brain. Learning to read repurposes elements of the brain’s left hemisphere associated with facial recognition and text recognition, together with a whole host of additional changes. Reading is, therefore, not only an essential technology for learning, it is a fundamentally transformative technology. And it is one that, if not learned at the right development moment, leaves children with gaps they may never fully address.
AI And Attention To Process
Amira Learning exists to prevent these gaps from ever arising. It does so by employing AI in precisely the right sort of way–to attend to the process of learning. Much of modern testing and assessment is driven by needs arising from a change in the learning process. In particular, the shift from a teaching model where a teacher works with a student who is learning and is observed in the process of learning by the teacher to a model where the teacher broadcasts information to students who primarily do their learning unobserved. In the former situation, testing and assessment are largely unneeded as the teacher will know what the student can and cannot do because the teacher has been watching the student do or fail to do what has been asked. In situations where the teacher is not able to attend to the students during the learning process, the teacher will only know what the student has been exposed to rather than what they can do, and so must rely on statistical sampling techniques to determine if the intended learning has happened.
With Amira, the AI agent assumes the role of the ever-attentive teacher. Amira allows students to choose from several appropriately complex and engaging texts to read, and then as students read out loud, Amira listens, assesses, and, when they struggle, provides feedback and support. This allows the student to do the work of learning and make the mistakes essential to the learning process but ensures that these mistakes are observed and addressed when the optimal learning moment is at hand.
The data bears this out; studies from Carnegie Mellon and Columbia Teacher’s College have shown positive effects on student learning, on par with what might be expected from working 1-1 with a teacher, and often exceed those expectations.
At the same time that students are learning, the classroom teacher and parents can receive the analysis of student strengths and weaknesses, with the opportunity for more intensive intervention as needed. This is where the connection with Istation enters the picture. As the integration between Amira and Instation occurs, these interventions can be dynamically constructed, drawing on Instation’s vast resource library. This will ultimately lead to students getting what they need sooner and better learning outcome
Long Term Evolution
As real-time deployment of AI agents becomes more common, educational software will increasingly shift from depending on static summative assessments that are used to determine where learning has fallen short to dynamic formative assessments that are integrated into the teaching and that are used to shape the experience of learning. If one can determine what a student knows by watching the student do the work of learning, and if one can determine how engaged a student is by watching how the student does the work of learning, then one should be able to achieve near real-time optimization rather than relying on the traditional cycle of instruction, assessment, and remediation.
With Amira and Istation coming together, the ingredients are there for impact. They expect to have a 15 percent of K-12 education market share, serving over 1,800 school districts globally by the end of the year. Time alone will determine whether they can realize the potential.