Benjamin Brazil
The primary method that U.S. schools use to assess the behavioral abilities of young children may be biased against students from underserved communities.
This is all the more alarming considering behavioral assessments can impact the educational trajectory of a student’s life.
Jared Izumi, assistant professor of counseling and school psychology in the Attallah College of Educational Studies, has been analyzing rater bias in schools since he wrote his dissertation on the subject.
“The decisions that are informed by these behavioral tests can be irreversible and lifelong,” said Izumi, a licensed child psychologist. “If you’re making those decisions for a child, you can’t just go back, so the stakes are very high.”
Behavioral assessments in schools rate children on social skills, aggression and anxiety, among other subjects. These are usually evaluated through rating scales. However, the current method can be problematic because the perception and biases of the person giving the ratings can negatively impact children’s scores.
Fortunately, Izumi is developing a program to eliminate rater bias with the use of virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
“I wanted to look at whether we can just evaluate kids directly by observing their behavior within a virtual reality environment,” said Izumi. “I want to reduce the bias associated with the rater so that we can get a truer picture of each child’s functioning.”
How it Will Work
Designed for third- to sixth-grade students, Izumi’s program requires children to wear a VR headset. The students will enter a virtual school environment where they will be tasked with responding to a variety of scenarios that usually play out in a classroom.
In Izumi’s first iteration of the program, a person recorded the action on a computer after a child performed some action within the VR world. This initial program was used in a 2023 study as more of a proof of concept. Izumi is now working on developing and testing the use of AI in the program.
The AI would remove the need for a person to record the behaviors by automatically coding the child’s reaction within the program, such as hitting another child, asking a teacher for help or attempting to problem-solve.
“For example, the AI will have to figure out how the user responded, such as by raising their hand or yelling at a teacher,” Izumi said. “So the AI has to understand the intent of the child. So it would be much more complex than the current iteration.”
The AI would also be able to adapt the VR environment to the children’s behavior. Characters and features in the VR environment would respond in more realistic ways, encouraging children to feel as if the virtual world is real.
“Then their responses will be similar to how they respond in reality,” Izumi said. “The goal is that we can have appropriate responses in VR but only if the responses in VR are similar to the responses in reality. That requires a pretty intelligent AI system.”
Improving Social Skills
In addition to improving the assessment of children’s behavioral skills, Izumi hopes his program will also be used for treatment or intervention to help schools engage students who have less developed social and emotional skills.
Currently, schools use roleplaying to help children refine these skills. But Izumi said this practice is problematic.
“We’re noticing in schools that kids have greater challenges with their social and emotional skills,” Izumi said. “So schools will use roleplaying but having a first-grader do a roleplay is pretty pointless.”
With Izumi’s VR program, students will be able to repetitively practice these skills in a controlled environment.
“It’s about figuring out what skills we need to teach them through better assessment,” Izumi said. “But then, it’s important to have adequate treatment or interventions, especially with the lack of social and emotional skills that we have seen since the pandemic. This is a new way of conducting this work that was literally impossible just a short time ago. For me, I am always thinking about how we can move the field forward.”
