PowerSchool Adding Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to Performance Matters and LearningNav

New Capabilities Will Save Significant Time for Teachers In Personalizing Student Assessments, Learning, PowerSchool Says

• By Kristal Kuykendall
• 06/20/23

Cloud-based software provider PowerSchool today unveiled a new integration with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Servicethat, starting this fall, will give PowerSchool subscribers access to OpenAI’s large language models within the Performance Matters and LearningNav solutions, which are part of PowerSchool’s Personalized Learning Cloud.

Adding GPT-4 capabilities to Performance Matters and LearningNav software “will dramatically improve educators’ ability to deliver personalized learning to students at scale by enabling the application of personalized assessments and learning pathways based on individual student needs and learning goals,” the company said in a news release. 

The new access to OpenAI technology will be overseen by “the same stringent privacy, ethics, and security standards that govern all PowerSchool products,” according to the announcement.

“The application of Azure’s OpenAI service within PowerSchool products will usher in a new era of personalized education, dramatically reducing the burden on teachers and providing truly individualized learning and support for every child,” said PowerSchool CEO Hardeep Gulati. 

The generative-AI functionality within the formative assessment software, Performance Matters, has the potential to significantly save time for teachers by providing them with AI-generated assessment items that are “aligned to a desired learning objective, grade level, subject, and standard, which the teacher can use to deliver more frequent formative assessments at scale,” the company said. 

“The AI-generated assessment items will be complemented by AI-powered Adaptive Testing in Performance Matters to better understand each student’s competency and personalized instruction needs,” PowerSchool said. Teachers can then use generative AI within the LearningNav software to “create multiple-choice questions within diagnostic tests personalized to each student’s competency level to assist in instruction and measure progress against learning goals.”

The company said it has built a “sophisticated model performance and quality monitoring” system that will check “factual accuracy of data, validation on reasoning, sensitivity, and content quality metrics” on an ongoing basis. 

Additionally, PowerSchool said it will continue to invest in “feature explain-ability, bias audits, and bias reduction strategies of both algorithmic and data fairness in the machine learning process to inculcate fairness, accountability, and transparency in machine learning while making sure all students benefit from these solutions.”

Learn more at PowerSchool.com.