Ross Nehm Selected to Serve on NSF-Funded AI Education Committee

Stony Brook University professor Ross Nehm has been selected to serve on the National Science Foundation-funded committee “Advancing AI in Science Education: A Comprehensive Approach to Equity, Inclusion, and Three-Dimensional Learning.”

Nehm, a leading researcher on the use of AI in student assessment and a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Ecology and Evolution, is one of 15 international scholars selected to serve on this NSF-funded committee, which is charged with establishing norms, frameworks, and guidelines for AI-involved science education research.

Nehm is a member of the graduate program in Science Education and the principal investigator of the Biology Education Research (BER) Lab at Stony Brook University, where he studies how reasoning and learning facilitate or constrain conceptual growth, scientific identity, and academic persistence in an individual. He has been working with machine learning and artificial intelligence for more than 15 years, building scalable methods to assess student learning in science education at Stony Brook University and K-12 schools.

Addressing the root of the issue, Nehm said, “Most professors use Multiple Choice Questions to assess their students, whereas the National Research Council policy documents state that scientific practices, like explaining, arguing, and model building, should be used to test students. But grading these skills takes a huge amount of time and effort.”

In his previous work, Nahm has developed methods to assess student learning in large classes. Over the past 10 years, his team has tested more than 10,000 students using sophisticated AI methods. As a result, they’ve been able to identify common learning difficulties, like equity gaps in students’ use of technology, and language barriers.

Read the complete story on the AI Innovation Institute website.