CENTURY generative AI tool to save teacher time reaches 97% accuracy

“I welcome the new AI feature of TeacherGenie, it has been very useful in creating targeted questions which cater for the distinct needs of the learners in specific groups. The fact that there are questions that cover particular content that help the learners practise specifications unique to GCSE English Language is extremely beneficial in increasing the learners’ knowledge and confidence.”

Julie Setchfield, John Ruskin College, 5th September 2024

With more than half (57%) of teachers using generative AI tools to help with their work, there is deepening concern of the trustworthiness of the outputs of these models. The DfE’s recent press release extols the virtues of providing learning resources, including curriculum guidance, lesson plans and anonymised pupil assessments, to generative AI models to improve accuracy. DfE tests show that providing this data to generative AI models “can increase accuracy to 92%, up from 67% when no targeted data was provided to a large language model.”

In order for generative AI to be effective, it requires additional context. As noted in the DfE’s findings on use cases for generative AI, “Generative AI is more efficient and accurate when given highly structured requirements”. The more context you give, the more reliable the outputs. 

CENTURY has already taken the lead in this approach, releasing TeacherGENie™ within its learning platform. Powered by cutting-edge generative AI, TeacherGENie™ has been extensively tested to generate easy to use worksheets on a specific area of knowledge chosen by the teacher.

What makes TeacherGENie™ more accurate is its contextual data. We are leveraging over 10 years of content created by CENTURY which has been used in live classrooms. From data about our high-quality learning content which is aligned to the curriculum and created by our expert teachers to how students use the learning content which has resulted in further refinement of our content over the years. Before its release, our Machine Learning and Curriculum teams worked closely to ensure that the quality of the outputs was as high as possible. We use the metadata, learning materials and questions from each of our micro-lessons to guide and inform the generative AI model on the content and level. In this way, TeacherGENie™ ensures that the generative AI model receives enough context to ensure the questions provided to students are accurate and trustworthy, saving teachers valuable time.

We carried out extensive internal acceptance testing. When questions were generated by GPT-4o with only the course, topic and specific area of knowledge provided, the questions generated were acceptable 57.5% of the time. This rose to 92.5% when we included our metadata, reference questions and learning material. We have further developed our methodology with teachers now accepting more than 97% of our questions and the technology being released to live classrooms.

The DfE report notes, “Educators must be engaged throughout the development cycle” to ensure tools such as TeacherGENie™ meet the needs of teachers and students alike. As well as teachers creating our content at CENTURY, we ensure they are involved in the improvement and refinement of our outputs by providing the ability to regenerate questions and state the reasons why. Initial usage demonstrates that 97.67% of our outputs are of the required content and level.

Here is one example from our testing on the topic of gravity for a key stage 2 science class:

GPT-4o without refinement or use of our proprietary data:

GPT-4o with CENTURY data:

The initial suggestion from GPT-4o is not adapted to the needs of key stage 2 learners, pitching the question at too high a level. The addition of CENTURY’s data as context ensures that the content and level are appropriate for the needs of key stage 2 learners.

The DfE’s exploration into generative AI in education highlights the importance of aligning AI tools with the National Curriculum and other educational standards. 

Our approach ensures that our AI outputs are not only accurate but also aligned with these standards. By staying ahead of these developments, CENTURY is not just participating in the AI revolution in education; we lead it for teachers and students, ensuring that our tools are both innovative and importantly, trustworthy. 

For more information about TeacherGENie, click here. Look out for more of CENTURY’s GENieSuite™ coming soon.