Automated educational technologies and personalized social-emotional learning in basic education

Abstract

This article discusses the meaning and scope of automated educational technologies applied in the field of basic education, especially in the domain of socio-emotional skills. It reviews the relevant literature on the recent development of this type of educational aids and, specifically examines their potential to produce and process digital data streams on the learning status of each schoolchild and to transform them into personalized instruction plans in accordance with predefined academic standards. It analyzes the premises of the predictive analytics methods that compute and produce such instructional plans and from this perspective, discusses both the conditions, possibilities and limitations of automated applications based on these methods and functionalities of artificial intelligence, particularly in the domain of socio-emotional learning. It concludes with proposals to recover for the public sphere the policy dialogue concerning what should be socially and educationally desirable learning.