According to Graham, reading and writing are deeply intertwined; You can’t have one without the other. Reading and writing make and report meaning, and they both draw some of the same processes in the brain, Graham said. He studies the development of writing and effectiveness of digital instruments that support the writing of K-12 students.
“Reading and writing are great learning tools,” Graham said. But when the AI tool makes “thinking” for students, such as generating large and complex parts of text, part of this training goes away. Take, for example, the outline of an essay. Outlining a document requires thinking about information, deciding what information to include and exclude and organize this information to make an argument, Graham said.
“If we separate our thinking, then it is less likely to learn so much and look at the material we write about in such depth,” he said.
According to Graham, revision is an important process of writing development and training. “When we write, new ideas come to us … and when we revive, the same job happens,” he said. When AI instruments are used to circumvent some of these important steps in developing written development such as outlines or revisions of essay, “The”struggle“The learning is also taken away.
But according to Graham, there is the right way to use AI as a “writing partner”. When you write, you make small adjustments as you go, he said. For example, you can write a sentence and wonder if you need to make a different word choice or change punctuation. When you use Chatgpt to offer alternative sentences to one that you have already written, you are required to make “wholesale estimates” of the material, Graham continued.
Using AI to help writing can become a metacognitive practice, not a time saving strategy. Instead of adjusting your own writing, consider using AI to generate alternative sentences. But you still need to be able to determine the “best” sentence.
“I think one of the biggest challenges of writing at the high school level or at any level at the moment is actually a time. Very little time is dedicated to writing, “Graham said.
Unfortunately, in a good day to study the weather is healthy. When the time is to be used to deal with other problems in the classroom, such as student apathy and loss of study, enough time may seem like an impossibility.
The pandemia changed everything
It was only when personal hours resumed during the 2021-22 school year did Knight notice a change in his students and technology. “Something really doesn’t work” during the virtual school, he said. This was not necessarily a change in the types of technology available to students, but a change in students’ relationships with this technology, Knight continued.
In the last four academic years, Knight has witnessed a decrease in social regulation skills for her students. He and his colleagues now give students a five-minute break in 90-minute block periods, a practice that did not exist before the pandemic. And although he works hard to engage his students in classroom activities, Knight often finds that they quickly explode what he calls “the sweet place of social commitment.” A socially engaging learning activity is now quickly becoming an unnecessary energy that does not favor learning, Knight said.
His first interaction with the more AI technologies in the classroom was negative. Some of Knight’s students used Chatgpt to cheat on an essay. So Knight decided to start using AI detection software, but the pendulum turned too far and he falsely accused a student of fraud. The result was a damaged With his student.
For the school year 2024-25 Knight prefers paper and pencilAnd does not assign a written work with an open response to laptops or computers. He no longer uses AI detection software.
The constant response to AI technology schools
Investments in technology such as generative AI are not necessarily the only way, or even the best way to improve students’ education, according to Justin Reich from Laboratories for the MIT teaching system. “Sometimes schools choose technology and sometimes choose other things,” he said.
The pandemic has forced all K-12 schools, regardless of their previous technological philosophy, to accept aggressively and adapt to extensive technological changes at lightning speed, Reich said. This has accelerated the course and exposure to certain technologies before many teachers and students are ready, he continued.
And less preparation can sometimes utter a more difficult path to success, especially during less connectivity and more social isolation.
It is easy to stop when thinking about the possibilities and interruptions that can be able to progress in the classroom. But remember that “in the last century, it is quite often for people to come up with technologies that surround the thinking of students,” Reich said. At one point, the encyclopedias provided a shortcut to students appointed “to summarize a topic based on multiple sources,” he said, “Calculators made the same species in the mathematics class; Google Translate may be a more new example. “
Reich uses these more technological achievements that changed the culture of learning as soon as they were familiar with students and teachers – but now they are used quite often – as a reminder that “as a field, we know something about coping and technology management,” he said.
Over the last few years, some schools have experienced high levels of students, using large language models or generative AI to nourish them for homework or essay questions. When these numbers reach a level of “crisis” and many students ask a machine to do a lot of their work, without their teachers knowing, the rate of hours is accelerated “because the teacher considers (students) understanding things, but they just feed it from Chatgpt,” Reich said.
Where are we now?
The good news is that the predicted exponentially sophisticated AI growth when Chatgpt 3.5 was released, it fell, according to Reich. “That’s nice for schools,” he continued. In his conversations and studies of Students, Reich said that overall young people understand that they – not AI – have to do the job. But most students agree that they use AI when they are pressed for time, are left on a problem, or have determined that the work given to them is of no use, the Reich added.
Reich and his colleagues recommend that teachers encourage students to think about AI tools as helping small parts of their work rather than supporting all their work. “So if you get stuck, don’t ask the machines to perform your assignment. Ask the machine to give you help with what the next step is, “he said.
After all, one solution does not fit everyone. Some schools and teachers, such as Knight, may decide that it is best for their learning environment and students if they return to a pencil and paper, while other educational spaces accept AI instruments and discussions with students surrounding them, said Reich.
Instead of thinking about AI as an instrument of efficiency, Graham likes to think about AI as a means of deeper trainingS “How can we help us do the things we want to do in a way that does not prevent learning and is also useful for a wide range of children?” Graham said. This sounds like a discouraging task, but there are some reasonable ways to apply AI as a tool that benefits the teacher and the student in the classroom and encourages training.
For example, Graham talks to a teacher who uses Chatgpt to produce sample writing with some of the most common mistakes used by students in this class. The class examined an example of “student” and deepened their understanding of their own writing, without being disturbed to separate the individual writing to students.
Although widely understood that the AI detection software is not reliable Has been shown that AI is Pretty good at providing feedbackGraham said. This does not mean that AI is better in providing feedback than humans, but AI is able to repeat the feedback that is similar and similar to the reviews generated by the human, Graham continued. But AI feedback gives us tools that are not often used when teacher feedback is given, and it’s skepticism.
