Teachers Need to See Who Is Learning

New research and policy debates this week pointed to the same limitation. Teachers cannot support every student well when the systems around them show only completed work and final grades.

What Happened This Week

On May 14, Teach Plus Illinois and the Illinois Digital Educators Alliance released a brief titled "From 'Rules and Tools' to Schools."¹²

Researchers from North Carolina State and Carnegie Mellon spent a school year logging 1,437,055 student interactions with an AI math tutor across 339 students in 14 classes.³⁴

Princeton's faculty voted on May 11 to end 133 years of unproctored exams, citing AI as the breaking point.⁵⁶

What These Stories Have in Common

Quietly disengaged students are easy to miss, while confident students receive attention because they know how to ask for it. AI can make this worse by helping students produce acceptable work without revealing confusion.

Koan starts from a simple premise. The final answer is no longer a reliable measure of learning. Schools need to understand how students reached that answer and whether the work made them more capable.

What Schools Can Do

Schools should give teachers a clear view of where students paused, what they changed, and which ideas they struggled to explain. That evidence can direct teacher attention toward students who would otherwise remain invisible.

Personalized education begins with knowing who needs help and why.