A Japanese city is exploring using artificial intelligence to address the challenging issue of school refusal, with student data analyzed to predict who may soon stop attending due to anxiety, bullying or other reasons.
The city education board of Toda in Saitama Prefecture near Tokyo trialed an AI system in the year through March, hoping to provide teachers with a tool to identify and support struggling students.
The number of primary and junior high school students not attending school for 30 days or longer has consistently risen in Japan over the past decade, with the figure for fiscal 2022 reaching a record just shy of 300,000.
The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology attributed the rise to a growing recognition that students do not necessarily need to attend school.
The AI-based prediction system assesses data on students, including attendance, academic achievement and health conditions. It also takes into account records of their visits to school nurses and bullying reports.
The system then makes predictions based on past data of students who stopped attending classes and shows how close a student is to the risk of chronic nonattendance. It color-codes the probability figures for each student, ranging from the highest "red" to "pink," "orange" and the lowest "yellow."
During the trial run at 18 primary and junior high schools, the program concluded that a total of 1,193 students were at high risk. Based on the outcome, teachers judged that 265 of the total needed to receive priority in receiving assistance, taking into account their behavior and other factors, according to the education board.
To deal with privacy concerns, the education board established rules to safeguard personal data and to prevent the AI-produced predictions from being used in any discriminatory treatment of students.
It also explained to parents in advance that they could block the use of their children's data by opting out of the project. Those in school management positions such as principals were the only ones who had access to the results.
"By using objective data, it is possible that we can prevent students from rejecting school," said Makiko Nakamuro, a Keio University professor who is an expert on education economics.
"But we need to carefully consider the need to ensure privacy by clearly explaining the objective and extent of data usage," she added.
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