Generative AI as a Teaching Partner for Personalised Learning Paths — Dar es Salaam and Dodoma, Tanzania

Researcher Juliana Kamaghe (Open University of Tanzania) studied how generative AI tools can help Tanzanian secondary-school teachers build personalised learning paths for students. Across schools in Dar es Salaam (urban) and Dodoma (semi-urban/rural), 120 teachers tested accessible generative AI tools — principally ChatGPT and Grok, alongside tools such as Curipod and MagicSchool.ai — to generate weekly lesson plans aligned to national syllabus objectives, automatically produce quizzes with adaptive difficulty, and tailor content to student diagnostic profiles.

The study used a convergent parallel mixed-methods design: a quantitative pre/post strand (paired t-tests) measuring student engagement and test performance alongside teacher workload, combined with usage logs, open-ended surveys and focus groups. Reported results include student engagement rising from 2.8 to 4.3 on a 5-point scale and mean test scores rising from 61% to 75%, alongside teacher-reported reductions in lesson-prep workload. Teachers described the tools as intuitive and useful for differentiating instruction. The findings are reported in both Research in Learning Technology (Association for Learning Technology, UK) and the Open University of Tanzania's Journal of Issues and Practice in Education (Vol. 17, Issue 2, 2026).

This is a single-researcher, single-cohort pre/post study without a no-AI control group, so the reported gains cannot be cleanly separated from general novelty effects, teacher enthusiasm, or concurrent instruction changes, and self-reported workload and engagement measures may be optimistic. The authors are candid that rural schools (more prevalent around Dodoma) face persistent connectivity, device and training gaps that limit equitable scale-up, positioning this as an encouraging pilot rather than a proven, ready-to-scale model.

Read the full analysis: https://journals.out.ac.tz/index.php/jipe/article/view/1983