SEOUL, September 11 (AJP) - A research team at Sookmyung Women's University will receive 1.16 billion won in government funding over the next four years to continue building artificial intelligence tools that assess students' skills, after advancing to the final stage of a national research program.
The team cleared a stage review with high marks in the Social Science Korea program, which the National Research Foundation of Korea runs to support long-term social science research, the university said Thursday. The new funding covers the period from Sept. 1 this year to Aug. 31, 2030.
First selected in September 2020, the team completed the program's first two stages over the following six years. Its project can run for up to 10 years under the program, and the third stage is the last.
The team's goal is a system that uses AI to assess the core competencies students need for the future and to support their learning. According to the team's research plan, those assessments are based on how students actually behave and perform.
Over the first two stages, the team published multiple papers in leading international social science journals, the university said. It also won best-paper awards from major Korean academic societies, including the Korean Educational Research Association, the Korean Society for the Study of Teacher Education and the Korean Society for the Gifted.
The team also carried its research into practice, building an aptitude and character assessment system for aspiring teachers with Sookmyung's teacher training center. With a gifted education center at KAIST, it developed a system that uses AI to evaluate students' competencies.
Led by Park So-young, an education professor who directs the university's education research institute and also heads its teacher training center, the team includes education professor Lee You-kyung, AI engineering professor Dong Suh-yeon and researchers from Kongju National University, KAIST and the Educational Testing Service, the U.S. nonprofit that runs the TOEFL and GRE exams.
By 2030, the team plans to build an AI-based learning system in which people and AI work together while learners stay in charge of their own learning and teachers' professional expertise is protected.
It also plans to develop ethics guidelines for the use of AI in education.
Copyright ⓒ Aju Press All rights reserved.