AIDA: An Artificially Intelligent Dialogic Reading Aid
Literacy has long been recognized as fundamental to academic success, as well as broader economic and health-related outcomes for both individuals and society. Whether due to developmental disability or socioeconomic impediments, as many as 40% of children enter Kindergarten a full year behind in fundamental language and literacy skills (Fielding et al, 2019). Once behind, it is difficult for these children to catch up (e.g., Foster & Miller, 2007).
Our project address this societal imperative by developing a technology that will facilitate Dialogic Reading (DR) between caregivers and young children. DR interventions, which involve encouraging children to engage in conversations around books (rather than passively listen), enjoy substantial empirical support (Towson et al., 2017, What Works Clearinghouse, 2007). However, their impact and scalability has been limited by a number of factors, including: 1) difficulties in teaching the complex strategy, 2) overly burdensome time and energy demands on caregivers, and 3) untenable professional resources required to alleviate this burden by incorporating DR conversation prompts into individual books.
The AIDA technology capitalizes on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to overcome these challenges. Similar to existing technology (Troseth et al. 2020), AIDA generates DR prompts at opportune times during a shared reading session in order to relieve parents from the burden of doing so. However, the AIDA technology is unique in its use of AI to generate these prompts in real time for any children’s book caregivers choose to read, thereby removing resource and expertise requirements that have made preceding efforts difficult to scale.
How to Get Involved
The AIDA Team is currently working on UX and UI testing, further tool development, and eventually evaluation research. If you are interested in any of these areas, please contact Amy Booth.
AIDA PI
AIDA Personnel
