Socratic Tutoring
Instead of providing answers, the AI asks open-ended questions that prompt students to explain their thinking and build metacognitive awareness.
ABOUT MY STORY DETECTIVE
Extending responsive literacy support for young readers.
My Story Detective is an AI-supported literacy project for K–2 students, developed at the UC Irvine Digital Learning Lab and Language Literacy Learning Lab.
THE PROJECT
Supporting the connected skills that early reading requires.
Learning to read calls on connected skills: understanding language, making meaning from text, and reading words. My Story Detective is designed to support these dimensions together as children develop as readers.
The project extends skilled, responsive literacy support to more learners while keeping teachers at the center of instruction.
PEDAGOGICAL APPROACH
Learning through dialogue.
Our AI–human dialogue simulates teacher-led dialogic reading, encouraging active verbalization, inference, and reflection.
Adaptive Cues
Scaffolding adjusts dynamically to each student’s verbal responses, providing just-in-time support during natural conversation.
WHY IT MATTERS
Individualized support is difficult to deliver at scale.
Research shows that one-to-one tutoring can dramatically improve outcomes. Staffing constraints, however, make individualized support difficult to deliver at scale.
My Story Detective is intended to bring more opportunities for guided literacy support into existing learning time while preserving the central role of educators.
WHAT GUIDES THE PROJECT
Grounded in early-literacy and dialogic-learning research.
My Story Detective builds on Professor Young-Suk Kim’s work in early literacy and the UCI Digital Learning Lab’s research on conversational agents and dialogic learning. These foundations guide the project’s focus on language, comprehension, and word reading.