KU researchers leading projects to make Library of Congress educational materials more accessible, use AI to aid writing instruction

LAWRENCE — Researchers at the University of Kansas have secured two grants to help educators leverage existing resources in new ways to teach writing to students with disabilities. They will do so through making digitized primary source materials from the Library of Congress more accessible and by using technology such as artificial intelligence to individualize proven writing approaches.

Library of Congress

Researchers in KU’s Center for Research on Learning, within the Life Span Institute, have received first-time funding from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources grant program. Since 2006, Congress has appropriated funds to the Teaching with Primary Sources program to establish and fund a consortium of organizations working to incorporate “the digital collections of the Library of Congress into educational curricula.” Each year, members of the TPS Consortium support tens of thousands of learners to build knowledge, engagement and critical thinking skills with items from the Library’s collections.

For this first-time grant, KU’s Center for Research on Learning will partner with PBS Newshour Classroom to make materials available through the educational site more accessible in efforts to boost writing and civics education. PBS Newshour Classroom is a publicly funded website that makes educational materials, including primary sources, from the Library of Congress available to teachers to use in writing and civics education. Students learn about topics in American history such as the Civil Rights Movement and learn, through access to primary sources, how they were covered at the time. Part of PBS Newshour Classroom, Journalism in Action program is an interactive website funded in part by a previous Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources grant project. It aims to introduce students to personally relevant topics, civics and media literacy. It also encourages students and teachers to use the topics as a chance to improve students’ writing.

Jocelyn Washburn and Suzanne Myers, both assistant research professors and KUCRL associate directors, are principal investigators for the projects.

“PBS Newshour Classroom has a wealth of excellent resources, but currently they are not readily accessible for students with disabilities and their teachers,” Myers said. “In terms of instructional tools, we’ll be looking to help teachers develop approaches to primary source materials that were not necessarily written for kids, and we’ll help make sure they’re available with more accessible features.”

The project’s first year, which started Oct. 1, is funded for $100,000 with the possibility of up to two additional one-year grants. It will proceed in four stages: Conducting qualitative research to determine needs, designing resources to address those needs, helping develop approaches to assist students in understanding the relevance of historical events to today, and designing professional learning and supports for educators.

The materials and resources developed will be designed with an eye toward accessibility for students with disabilities. The researchers said that could take the form of interactive tools such as maps, lesson plans and instructional tools for teachers and students to help students understand the importance of historical events. The project also intends to provide instructional resources and activities focused on helping each student connect historical events with current and community-based issues students may find relevant to their own lives.

“The volume of students secondary teachers can have and number of topics they cover can be overwhelming,” Myers said. “We’ll be designing scaffolds for students and for teachers to help them learn and write about something each of them has personal interest in. We’ll be making already amazing resources from the Library of Congress more exciting for teachers and for kids to use in their learning.”

U.S. Office of Special Education Programs

Washburn and Myers have also secured a five-year, $1.875 million grant as part of the Stepping Up Technology Implementation program from the Office of Special Education Programs to add new technological capabilities to a research-backed writing instruction model. That will fund Project iSTAR: An Integrated, Strategic Technology-based Adaptive wRiting Program, which will add AI capabilities to writing lessons based on SIM, the Strategic Instruction Model.

SIM, developed at KU, has been used by hundreds of teachers nationwide in writing education for more than 40 years, first on paper and through other technologies such as CD-ROM and flash drives. Project iSTAR will focus on middle and high school students with writing difficulty and give their teachers new capabilities in writing education.

“We will be building a new technology-based writing program that takes the existing SIM writing strategies and refreshes and repurposes them with the capabilities of what artificial intelligence can do,” Washburn said. “Hundreds of teachers have used these tools in their classrooms, but this will allow them to do it through a system that has a teacher dashboard, a student dashboard, and also allows administrators and families to view and support students’ writing.”

The iSTAR program will help students express their thoughts effectively in writing, as SIM has done, but will support teachers to work with many more students than they were previously able. Students will complete an interest inventory that will then allow the system to provide them prompts based on topics they are interested in writing about. They will receive one-on-one support for writing sentences with increasing levels of complexity, and then paragraphs.  Both teachers and students will receive feedback along the way about progress and needed improvements. The program will be adaptive, meaning it will use student work and assessment information to adjust support based on the needs of each student.

Previous work from the Center for Research on Learning has found that student writing improves when it is based on topics they are interested in, as opposed to those simply assigned.

For the first two years of the grant, researchers will build Project iSTAR with at least two schools. They will then test its effectiveness in a Sequential, Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial (SMART) study, implement it in three new schools, and scale up for broader use across the country in years four and five, respectively.

One of the biggest challenges of SIM has been finding the time for teachers to provide writing feedback to students. Project iSTAR aims to bring research-backed approaches from pen and paper to AI-supported models that can help educators reach many more students in writing instruction.

“We’re hoping schools using paper-based versions of SIM can be introduced to this option and to bring schools that haven’t used SIM on board as well,” Washburn said. “This can allow them to implement it on a much wider basis, and we can provide it at a very low cost to schools that otherwise might not be able to afford it. And it’s all research-based. We want to do this in a way that keeps teachers central to the instruction and in a way that technology supports them, not supplants them.”