How does STEER help prepare students for work & life in an AI economy?

STEER has run a 15 year programme to develop tools to train such human skills in students.  STEER’s tools are all powered by research-based strategies. We have developed models to measure and improve functions of the mind which are uniquely human, so that our results are quantifiable. 

AI is performing an increasing range of professional functions- including reporting and report writing, auditing, accounting, legal work, research analysis and more. The resources which underpin those roles are no longer unique to humans.

However, some skills require uniquely human neural processing: these include emotional skills, metacognition, social and self-regulation and many aspects of leadership.   We can call these ‘human skills’, and such human skills will become increasingly important to preserve and cultivate in an AI age.

“STEER has developed technologies to turn such human skills, often seen as soft skills, into hard, measurable, trainable metrics. Using proprietary data models and cognitive measurement techniques, our tools advance the race to accelerate human skill development.”

Out tools include:

STEER Student Wellbeing Development Platform

Termly feedback for every Y7-11 student, tailored to their personal needs, to improve their mental health, learning and relationships.

USTEER Soft Skills Course 

Personalised soft skill training app for Y12-13 students to train the human skills required in the workplace.

STEER Tracking

BETT award winning, peer-reviewed mental health tracking tool to measure and improve social-emotional self-regulation.

Does STEER make use of AI in its own products?

STEER’s goal is to strengthen human : human interactions, not human : bot interactions. STEER scaffolds and prompts teachers and students to review, reflect and react better to strengthen their bond and improve mental health. 

Integrating AI to do some additional prompting and personalisation is something we are considering if it might help. However, we would only do so once we are clear that- to use an image- we are not training a cyclist to get fit by using an E-Bike. We will run careful experiments to learn more about the mental health benefits, use-contexts and potential downsides so that our approach is fully informed. Right now, there’s too little data to understand AI’s impact.

“Robust evidence shows that the quality of the feedback, dialogue and relationship between student and teacher is the single most effective accelerator to learning, contributor to mental health and safeguarder of wellbeing.”

How is AI accelerating STEER’s research efforts?

STEER owns a valuable and growing decade-long high-quality homogeneous, structured dataset of adolescent self-regulation.  We mine this to produce insights into the emerging mental health risks for young people. We provide advisory guidance to our customers, and on occasion government organisations, to inform their actions.

Our current efforts have resulted in findings around:

– Perfectionism

– Gender trends and mental health risks

– The rise in internalising disorders

– Patterns of self-regulation linked to ASD

– Impacts of boarding v day education on the development of social skills

“Training AI on STEER’s structured dataset is relatively trivial and likely to produce even stronger research dividends. We anticipate building increasing AI integrations to accelerate this programme and enhance STEER’s capability as a forward signalling advisory agency.”

Does STEER see benefits for schools in using AI?

STEER sees many applications of AI that could free up teachers to focus on their core role. This role is to accompany each student through adolescence so they acquire the skills needed to thrive in life intellectually, socially and emotionally.

Some research suggests teachers currently spend 60% of their time on non-teaching tasks: planning, marking and reporting. AI has the potential to reduce that workload. For example, AI can:

• Flag repeated errors made by a student, directing them to exercises tailored to overcome that weakness.

• Help personalise student learning.

• Enable teachers mark 30 scripts and summarise the key issues to address very quickly.

• Aggregate and analyse behavioural, attendance, academic and mental health data

“Used this way, AI has the potential to free up teacher time. Valuable teacher time is best spent in conversation with students modelling learning, facilitating discussion and scaffolding experimentation.”

Adolescence is also a period of critical social-emotional development which determines life-long outcomes beyond the classroom. Investing in the relationship a student has with their teachers and peers is a strong protective factor to prevent longer-term societal problems.

School can be an incubator of strengths such as emotional resilience, social competency and relational network. These all underpin a person’s long term health and wellbeing. Using AI for non-relational work tasks can help societies switch schools to be investors in long-term citizen strength.