NSF FF: Planning: Co-Designing an AI-Supported Empathic Communication Platform for High School Classrooms

Award ID: 2627511

This FINDERS Foundry award builds healthier communication skills between students and teachers to support stronger relationships and safer classroom environments. While many high school students face stress, conflict, and social pressure, they often lack tools to express themselves clearly or listen with empathy. Teachers require support to address each learner especially while managing busy classrooms. By designing an AIsupported communication platform, students and learners engage in positive dialogue, learn to reframe conflict, and build understanding. Families, educators, and students shape the design so guidance is practical, respectful, and ageappropriate. By improving everyday communication, the project creates classrooms where students are engaged and supported, and where they can develop durable skills. This FINDERS Foundry award develops the design requirements, scenario prompts, prototype interfaces, and evaluation measures for an AIsupported communication assistant grounded in evidencebased practices from extant academic research. The project translates academic practices into interactive, branching scenarios to help students and teachers engage in reflective, empowered dialogue. Technical work includes defining interaction logic for AImediated reflection, specifying metrics for usefulness and trust, and capturing alignment with real classroom communication demands. Codesigned activities with educators and students will produce training materials, scenario libraries, and classroomaligned guidance for implementing the tool into instructional routines. Outputs form the conceptual and technical foundation for a scalable platform that supports learning across a variety of secondary learner settings. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Lindsay Portnoy