How AI is helping students improve reading and writing

Today, 88% of all low-income students are not proficient with basic writing skills, which is a huge barrier to entry in terms of success in college and career development. This issue is exacerbated by the lack of time students get to practice writing and receiving feedback. On average, students spend just 15 minutes practicing writing every week because it's so time-intensive for teachers to offer feedback.

Quill.org, a nonprofit founded by a group of educators and technologists, is on a mission to make kids better writers, readers, and critical thinkers. Since 2014, they’ve been developing a suite of tools to do just that. Most recently, with the help of a $1.3 million grant from Google.org, Quill.org developed Reading for Evidence, which uses AI to give students immediate feedback on writing and reading comprehension and saves teachers hundreds of hours every year.

While schools have the option of purchasing a premium version of the tool, any school can use Quill.org free of charge. Quill.org has been widely adopted as one of the top four nonprofit literacy tools in the U.S and serves more than 12,000 schools across the country in all 50 states. More than eight million students nationwide, five million of whom attend low-income (Title 1-eligible) schools, have used Quill.org's AI-powered literacy tools. These tools save the average time-strapped teacher 90 hours per year. In the 2022-2023 school year alone, 2.8 million students wrote and received feedback on 450 million sentences, which would otherwise take about 3.6 million hours of teachers’ time to provide feedback on.

Google.org is supporting more nonprofits around the world driving educational outcomes through personalized learning. In Kenya, EIDU is using low-cost smartphones and AI to provide personalized tutoring for pre-primary and primary school students—all available off-line for hard-to-reach areas. In India, Rocket Learning Foundation, is developing an AI coach that can create localized academic content and personalized learning paths for children in India.

At the college level in the US Google.org recently continued their support  of the DataKind partnership with CUNY John Jay College. After building an AI powered tool to identify and support students at risk of dropping out, they improved senior graduation rates from 54% to 86% in just two years.