Positive Artificial Intelligence in Education (P-AIED): A Roadmap

The unprecedented global movement of school education to find technological and intelligent solutions to keep the learning ecosystem working was not enough to recover the impacts of Covid-19, not only due to learning-related challenges but also due to the rise of negative emotions, such as frustration, anxiety, boredom, risk of burnout and the so-called “Covid fatigue”. Although this is not a new problem, it was deepened during the pandemic, and we need to face old and new challenges in different ways. Despite focusing only on the learning system’s inefficiencies and on the hegemony of solutions to tackle the learning gap, we also need to shed light on the strengths and the positive aspects of the learning process to promote wellbeing. As highlighted by John Self, an intelligent tutoring system would behave as if it genuinely cared about the student’s success. This note from John Self sheds light on the importance and reflection of what success means and for whom. This study presents a roadmap for positive psychology and artificial intelligence in education. It is intended to identify and understand how the intersection of Positive Psychology and Artificial Intelligence in Education can support the promotion of learning and wellbeing of students, teachers, and other educational stakeholders. As such, a bibliometric analysis of positive psychology and artificial intelligence in education was made as the so-called Positive Artificial Intelligence in Education (P-AIED). The search string was performed in 2021, and the total number of studies gathered was 10,777. After all the PRISMA steps, 256 studies were approved according to the inclusion criteria. The main conclusions were the high number of institutions and researchers with related publications indicate a new trend for the community of AIED; the high number of collaboration from different countries indicates a possible global movement toward P-AIED; Positive Emotion and Engagement were the main Positive Psychology constructs identified in the studies; the lack of well-grounded theories of Positive Psychology indicates an excellent research opportunity; Positive Learning Analytics (P-LA), Positive Educational Data Mining (P-EDM) and Positive Intelligent Tutoring Systems (P-ITS) are three hot topics for P-AIED.