- Fears that generative AI helps students cheat are rife, and some school districts are banning it.
- But concerns about cheating with AI don’t address underlying issues in education, experts say.
- Instead, educators should think about how generative AI can be used as a tool for classroom learning.
Leah Henrickson is no stranger to artificial intelligence.
The University of Leeds digital media lecturer has been using AI in her classroom since 2018 by asking her students to “write” essays with text generators that can respond to different personalized prompts. Once the model finds an answer, students break down these blocks of text and discuss the arguments generated by the AI.
By approaching AI as a tool with his students, it forces his class to think about the possibilities and limits of technology to accomplish different creative tasks.
“We get our students to think critically about these tools,” she said.
Before ChatGPT burst onto the scene late last year – making generative AI a household term – some teachers were already using AI technology in the classroom to excite students to learn, rather than to introduce them as a tool to cheat on homework writing.
Edtech startups like Koalluh, which generates short stories to get young kids excited about reading, or Pressto, a tool to help teachers with AI-generated lesson prompts to motivate students to write more, have been around longer. than OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
But what sets ChatGPT apart from other AI technologies is the huge potential for students to use it to cheat and plagiarize. It even scared the New York City Department of Education – the largest public school system in the United States – which announced earlier this month that it was banning ChatGPT on school computers and networks. More and more school districts across the country are adopting similar policies.
Whether such bans are practical or effective remains to be seen. Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview that the company will develop ways for schools to detect AI plagiarism. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Insider spoke with several AI researchers and academics, startup founders, and nonprofit leaders to find out how they approach generative AI in the classroom. All said the bans on new technology were misguided at best and students could circumvent them if they wanted to.
Instead, fears around generative AI in the classroom point to bigger issues with how local and state governments assessed learning in schools in the first place, which tend to focus on memorization. rote rather than deeper understanding.
In countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, education is no more than a way to pass a test or write an essay for a passing grade, and this “has harmed the function essential part of education, which is to develop understanding and the process of discovering the world,” said Henrickson.
“As long as we focus on education as outcomes, GPTs and AI will be a threat, but it cannot replace the problem-solving process, which is the real way to learn,” said- she added.
Welcoming AI into the classroom with open arms
In the long term, embracing new technology rather than banning it would better prepare young learners for the world of work they will enter after leaving school, as AI will only become more pervasive in our daily lives, some academics, founders and stated nonprofit education leaders. If used effectively, generative AI tools like ChatGPT can help students develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills, which are crucial learning outcomes for most teachers.
Teaching students at all stages how to work with AI will be crucial to their success after they graduate, said University of Minnesota law professor Jon Choi. He recently conducted an experiment to determine if, if prompted, ChatGPT could provide answers to pass a law school exam while being blind-graded alongside exams taken by real students. And he did.
“My view is that lawyers will start using these tools if they haven’t already, and law courses should be changed to reflect that,” Choi said.
Edtech startups like Pressto have developed generative AI technology to help teachers. The company, which was founded in 2021 by journalist Daniel Stedman, helps teachers create writing assignments ranging from traditional essays to news articles or DIY magazines for students in grades three through eight.
For students, it can be a fun experience to create a magazine, print it, fold it up and show it to their family, Stedman said. Since creative prompts engage students and are fun, it can increase their learning outcomes, he added.
“We give AI to teachers and don’t encourage it for students,” he said.
Cheating fears
Despite buzzing reports of generative AI being used to grade assignment passing grades, experts agree that most teachers would be able to tell if a student was using technology to write assignments without at least one effort to cover the tracks.
Richard Culatta, a former high school Spanish teacher who now heads the International Society for Technology in Education, said well-trained teachers should be able to spot written assignments only with ChatGPT or another tool. Generative AI, as they will recognize an individual. student’s writing style and see how it has evolved over time.
“If there’s a document that’s handed over and I can’t tell if it was written by a child or an AI, there’s a process that’s been broken,” he said.
And in Choi’s law school exam experiment, ChatGPT scored a C-plus average and “bombarded” any question involving math, he tweeted.
“He would potentially do well in law school, but he would be one of the weaker students,” he told Insider.
In the short term, a good way to circumvent fears of cheating would be to require students to work more on assignments in person, said Hadi Partovi, the founder of the nonprofit education organization. Computing Code.org. One way to teach complex topics might be through class debates rather than essays. That way, students are actively engaged and wouldn’t be able to use generative AI to complete a full assignment, he said.
But moving the education system towards this model is an uphill battle that has only been exacerbated by pandemic learning loss and teacher shortages.
“These are good times for self-reflection, to make sure education is really doing what we want to do,” said Henrickson, a professor at the University of Leeds. “If we re-emphasize education as a process rather than a series of outcomes, we can use these models to improve learning.”