Working with BU Wheelock to strengthen AI evaluation in education
Just Horizons Alliance is working with Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development to develop education-specific components of the AI Ethics Index.
The AI Ethics Index for K-12 Education is designed to help educators, policymakers, funders, and companies evaluate the safety, educational quality, transparency, and equity of AI tools used in schools.
AI tools are moving into classrooms quickly, and school systems are being asked to make high-stakes decisions about technologies that shape instruction, student support, assessment, engagement, and learning. No widely accepted evaluation method currently gives school systems a comprehensive way to assess whether these tools are safe for students, effective for learning, transparent in design, equitable in impact, and appropriate for real educational settings. The Index is built to inform those decisions with independent evidence about the performance of AI tools.
Educators deserve more than broad assurances when evaluating whether AI tools can effectively support teaching and learning. The AI Ethics Index is designed to give educators, policymakers, and technology leaders a more rigorous way to understand how AI systems actually perform in practice and whether they strengthen or undermine the conditions students need to learn, develop, and thrive.
Janet Kang, executive director, Just Horizons Alliance
The BU Wheelock collaboration
The collaboration brings together two kinds of expertise: Just Horizons Alliance’s work on the Index framework, technical testing methods, and ethical analysis, and BU Wheelock’s knowledge of education, human development, measurement, and classroom implementation. Together, we will design and validate education-specific indicators that place learning outcomes, student development, equity, and classroom implementation at the center of the evaluation of these systems.
Improving education requires understanding the effects of any new tool or system on learning, teaching, development, and opportunity. This collaboration reflects the need for evaluation methods that are grounded in the realities of classrooms and the needs of students and educators.
Penny Bishop, dean, BU Wheelock
You can read more about the framework in the Education overview and the methodology behind it.