ChatGPT can make a huge difference in the field of Special Education. AI has the ability to help students with learning disabilities in practical and supportive ways. Through personalized instruction, AI can tailor lessons to fit each student’s needs, make reading easier by summarizing or simplifying text, or highlight important information. Additionally, AI can help students grow their vocabulary and give them helpful feedback on their writing.

There are early reports that AI has shown to be helpful in identifying possible learning disabilities in students, which will allow students to get the support they need sooner. By leveraging AI in the classroom, learning can become more accessible and effective for everyone.

Creating Personalized Instruction for Every Student

One of ChatGPT’s best applications is to be used as a personalized tutor or assistant for a student. If given basic information about the student’s needs or learning styles, the chatbot can restructure curriculum material to suit them. Information can be presented in different formats and styles, such as restructuring a long-form text into bullet points, bolding text for easier reading, breaking up long paragraphs into smaller sections, and much more.

So what’s our takeaway? Students are able to take control of their learning process to get the help they need with near instantaneous responses.

Using AI to Summarize Text

Summarizing a longform document or research text is a great first step to support students who are struggling with reading comprehension. Text can be copied and pasted into ChatGPT preceded by an instruction like;

“Please summarize this text for me, it’s too complicated. Include bullet points.”

Additional or alternate instructions can be used to suit the learner’s style. For instance, instead of bullet points, you can ask it to help with comprehension using analogies. For example;

“Please summarize this text for me, it’s too complicated. Use really simple language to help me understand the content, then provide some analogies to explain the content.”

Allowing students to see this summary alongside the original text can be helpful first step for the student to comprehend text that they are finding to be a bit beyond their current level.

Simplifying Text for Students

Another use case, which could be used as a preceding step or on it’s own, is having AI simplify content. Text can be copied and pasted into ChatGPT after given a prompt. An example prompt might be;

“I will send you some text that is way too complicated for me. Can you please leave the information the same, but rewrite it to use much easier words and make it far easier to understand?”

This strategy is helpful for developing a student's reading comprehension skills. Students can work off of the simplified text to gain an understanding of the content, then compare it to the original text to develop their skills at understanding that higher reading level.

Editing Text for Easier Reading

If you want the student to use the original text unmodified, having AI emphasize certain words or sections can assist students with complex writing. Similar to the above, text can be copied and pasted into ChatGPT preceded by an instruction like;

“I will send you some text that is a little hard for me to understand. Can you keep the text the same, but bold the parts that seem the most important to understand the content?”

This is a tool you might choose to employ if a student is very close to achieving a new reading level, but needs more help to get there. This method changes the content the least, so is more a helpful nudge to fill the last gaps in the student’s comprehension.

AI for Feedback

When students are producing writing of their own, feedback is a critical step to help them refine their work. It can often be difficult for a single teacher to provide high-quality feedback for every student within a short time frame. AI can help with this, as students are able to copy and paste their writing into ChatGPT after prompting it with instructions like;

“I am writing an essay, and I would appreciate some feedback. The essay is about surviving in space, and I am being graded on structure, vocabulary, and grammar. Here is what I have so far, please let me know any ways I can improve the essay.”

This method gives students instant feedback on their work, which means they have more time to improve and revise their writing before its due date. If the feedback is too complex for the student to understand, they can ask ChatGPT to “please make your feedback simpler to understand.” Another benefit here is that since AI isn’t an actual person, students who might have anxiety about approaching their teacher or another advisor don’t need to grapple with those feelings and instead ask ChatGPT for help instead.

Increasing Student Vocabulary

In many cases, students rely heavily on the same subset of words or phrases with little deviation. ChatGPT can help students expand their vocabulary in multiple ways. Students can use a prompt to asking ChatGPT how they could improve, such as;

“I will send you some of my writing. I’m trying to figure out words or phrases that I overuse, are there any in my writing that I use too often?”

If a student is already aware they overuse certain words or phrases, they could ask ChatGPT the following to help them improve;

“I find I keep using certain words or phrases over and over … I want to expand my vocabulary, can you give me recommendations? Here are the words I overuse…”

This is an easy way for students to expose themselves to new words and phrases that can improve their writing as well as their overall reading comprehension.

AI for Teacher Workflow

As much as this tool helps students, it also has huge implications for improving teacher workflows. As previously mentioned, this makes creating individualized feedback more manageable. However, these tools can assist teachers in many other ways, like reducing time spent on writing assignments or rubrics. For example, a query like the following might help a teacher quickly generate a draft for an assignment that they can then revise to suit their needs;

“I am a special education teacher for a class of high school students. I need to create a writing assignment about \_**\_, focusing on \_\_\_**. Please create the assignment outline and a rubric to go along with it. Please create the rubric in table format, and don’t include scores or percentages.”

You can also provide any additional information to have the AI curate the assignment to your needs, so the time invested in creating classwork can be greatly reduced. As ChatGPT is a chat-based interface, you can even revise and collaboratively work on an assignment with ChatGPT in an assistive role.

The Future of Learning Disability Identification

We can already see the other possible benefits of AI tools, such as the possibility of AI analyzing student data. Looking at academic performance records, assessments results, behavior patterns, attendance records, and social-emotional data, the information could be processed so that AI can identify potential indicators or patterns that may suggest a learning disability. Similarly, AI could monitor students’ academic progress and compare it to established benchmarks or norms that are set for students in the current academic year. AI can identify consistent patterns, and point out areas where students are falling behind.

Advancements are happening quickly, and soon tools will be released that can improve the effectiveness of our current tools and strategies. Already, ChatGPT-4 has been released (although paywalled) and demonstrates large improvements over the base ChatGPT model.

Overall, AI can be an incredibly helpful tool to bridge learning gaps for special education students. Teaching students to engage with tools to provide personalized learning, breaking down complex texts, and assist with developing their own writing skills. AI’s capability to provide instant responses and process text in seconds presents a unique opportunity for supporting these learners and engaging with their specific learning needs. Given that AI will only become more relevant, teaching our students how to leverage AI for their learning is bound to produce great results.