Research
What Drives TRAIL Lab’s Research
Artificial intelligence (AI) exacerbates educational inequities by threatening heterogeneity and promoting cultural and linguistic hierarchies. When used in learners’ contexts that differ from the majority, AI tend to perform significantly worse, leading to biased assessments, perpetuation of cultural stereotypes, increased hallucinations, and failure to capture linguistic and cultural nuances.
What does TRAIL Lab aim to solve through its research?
TRAIL Lab’s research addresses persistent educational inequities that arise when AI is introduced into classrooms. These inequities often affect historically marginalized students and are rooted in how AI systems are designed, evaluated, and used in real-world educational settings.
How does TRAIL Lab tackle these challenges?
By working at the intersection of learning sciences, learning analytics, AI, and human-centered design, TRAIL Lab develops new methods to identify and mitigate AI biases. We center the lived experiences of historically marginalized students in our design processes to ensure AI systems reflect their realities.
What role do teachers play in TRAIL Lab’s research?
A key part of our work is enabling K–12 teachers to use AI in ways that recognize and amplify students’ linguistic and cultural assets. Our tools and methods are designed to support educators in creating more inclusive, responsive, and equitable learning environments.
Our research makes methodological, empirical, and design contributions to
Educational AI
We design multilingual and multicultural large language models (LLMs) and develop stakeholder-driven, context-aware methods for evaluating AI in education.
AI Fairness
We create novel approaches to measuring AI bias that go beyond traditional demographic categories, accounting for context, lived experience, and power dynamics.
Learning Analytics
We develop analytics to capture the non-dominant ways students express meaning, communicate, and learn — for example, by surfacing cultural assets in scientific argumentation.
Teacher Tools
We build tools that support equitable classroom practices, such as real-time assistance for culturally sustaining pedagogy and multimodal analytics for teacher reflection.