University of Chicago’s Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab awarded $500,000 to scale AI early learning innovation
The University of Chicago’s Behavioral Insights and Parenting (BIP) Lab has received a $500,000 grant from the US Department of Education’s Institute of Educational Sciences.
BIP will be tasked with developing the Chat2Learn Suite, an AI-powered tool designed to support high-quality language interactions between children and their parents and teachers.
"We are honored to be part of the first S2S cohort," comments Ariel Kalil, Daniel Levin Professor of Public Policy and Co-director of the BIP Lab. "The ARPA model has fueled transformative advances in many domains. Bringing that ambition to education represents a major shift."
The award is part of the Department’s From Seedlings to Scale program, a new scheme funding high-risk, high-reward projects with the potential to have breakthrough impact.
A six-month randomized trial of Chat2Learn found it had "significant effects" on children’s vocabulary growth and parents reported increased confidence in their child’s ability to learn.
The BIP Lab project will develop the full Chat2Learn suite for pre-school and kindergarten classrooms that serve low-income families, in partnership with Chicago-based charter schools and Head Start networks in the US.
The Suite hopes to integrate classroom and in-home components to support teachers in embedding open-ended conversations into their daily routines with their children, increasing engagement at home and strengthening teacher-parent relationships. If successful, the scheme will progress to scale and evaluation.
