According to Graham, reading and writing are deeply linked; You cannot have one without the other. Reading and writing have meaning and communicate a meaning, and they both rely on some of the same processes in the brain, Graham said. He studies the development of writing and the effectiveness of digital tools that support writing for students from kindergarten to 12th year.
“Reading and writing are excellent tools for learning,” said Graham. But when an AI tool makes “thought” for students, such as generating important and complex parts of text, part of this learning disappears. Take an overview of the test for example. Describing an article requires thinking about information, making decisions about the information to be included and excluding, and organizing this information to make an argument, Graham said.
“If we disengage our reflection, then we are less likely to learn so much and to examine the material on which we write in depth,” he said.
According to Graham, revision is an important process of writing and learning. “When we write, new ideas come to us … and when we revise, the same kind of thing happens,” he said. When AI tools are used to bypass some of these important steps in writing development such as a test plan or revisions, the “struggle” of learning is also removed.
But, according to Graham, there is a good way to use AI as “writing partner”. When you write, you make small adjustments as you go, he said. For example, you can write a sentence and ask if you have to make a different choice of words or change punctuation. When you use Chatgpt to suggest alternative sentences to those you have already written, you need to make “wholesale” equipment, Graham continued.
The use of AI to help in writing can become a metacognitive practice rather than a time reduction strategy. Rather than adjusting your own writing, consider using AI to generate alternative sentences. But you must always be able to determine the “best” sentence.
“I think that one of the biggest challenges for writing at the secondary level or at any level at the moment is essentially time. Very little time is devoted to writing, ”said Graham.
Unfortunately, during a good learning day, time is tight. When time must be used to solve other problems in class, such as student apathy and learning, having enough time may seem impossible.
The pandemic has changed everything
It was only when the classes in person resumed during the 2021-22 school year that Knight noticed a change in his students and technology. “Something really didn’t work” during virtual school, he said. It was not necessarily a change in the types of technologies available to students, but a change in the relationship of students to this technology, Knight continued.
Over the past four school years, Knight has seen the drop in social regulation skills of his students. He and his colleagues now offer students a five -minute break during the 90 -minute block periods, a practice that did not exist before the pandemic. And although he works hard to creatively engage his students in class activities, Knight often finds that they quickly blow before what he calls the “ideal point of social commitment”. A socially engaging learning activity quickly turns into excess energy that is not conducive to learning, said Knight.
Its first interaction with the new IA technology in class was negative. Some Knight students used Chatgpt to cheat a test. Knight therefore decided to start using AI detection software, but the pendulum swung too far, and he falsely accused a cheating student. The result was a damaged relationship with his student.
For the 2024-25 school year, Knight prefers paper and pencil, and does not attribute written response work open to laptops or computers. He no longer uses AI detection software either.
Continuous response from schools to AI technology
Investments in technology like generating AI are not necessarily the only way or even the best way to improve student learning, according to Justin Reich of Mit’s Teaching System Labs. “Sometimes schools have chosen technology, and sometimes they have chosen other things,” he said.
The pandemic forced all schools from kindergarten to 12th year, regardless of their previous technological philosophy, to adopt and adapt aggressively to large technological changes at lightning speed, said Reich. This accelerated the move and exposure to certain technologies before many teachers and students were ready, he continued.
And less preparation can sometimes mean a more difficult path to success, especially during a period of less connectivity and more social isolation.
It is easy to spir while reflecting on the possibilities and disturbances whose advancement of AI may be capable in class. But remember: “It is quite common during the last century that people invent technologies that bypass students’ thought,” said Reich. At one point, the encyclopedias provided a shortcut to students assigned to “summarize a subject based on several sources”, he said, and “the calculators did the same kind of thing in mathematics class; A more recent example could be Google Translate. »»
Reich uses this previous technological progress that has changed the culture of learning at a time when they were presented to students and teachers – but are now used quite often – to recall that “as a field, we know something about the management and management of technologies,” he said.
Over the past two years, some schools have experienced high levels of students using large -language models or generative AI to feed them with responses to homework or test questions. When these figures reach a level of “crisis”, and many students ask a machine to do a lot of their work without their teachers knowing it, the pace of the classes accelerates “because the teacher thinks that (students) understand things, but they simply nourish him the responses of Chatgpt,” said Reich.
Where are we now?
According to Reich, the good news is that the exponentially sophisticated AI growth fell flat, according to Reich. “It’s a good thing for schools,” he said. In his conversations and investigations to students, Reich said that, in general, young people understand that they – and not AI – should do the work. But most of the students agree that they use AI when they are pressed by time, are stuck on a problem or have determined that the work which has been given to them has no value, added Reich.
Reich and his colleagues recommend that teachers encourage students to consider AI tools as helping with small parts of their work rather than contributing to all of their work. “So if you are stuck, don’t ask the machines to do your mission. Ask the machine to give you help on the next step, “he said.
In the end, a solution does not correspond to everyone. Some schools and teachers, such as Knight, could decide that it is preferable for their learning environment and students if they return to pencil and paper, while other educational spaces adopt AI tools and discussions with the students around them, said Reich.
Instead of considering AI as an efficiency tool, Graham likes to consider AI as a deeper means of learning. “How can it help us do the things we want to do in a way that does not lead to learning and is also beneficial for a wide range of children?” said Graham. It looks like an intimidating task, but there are reasonable ways to implement AI as a tool that benefits both the teacher and the student in class and promotes learning.
For example, Graham spoke with a teacher who used Chatgpt to produce a writing sample with some of the most common errors used by students in this class. The class has examined the “student” example generated by the AI and deepened its understanding of its own writing without the embarrassment of distinguishing the writing of a student.
Although it is widely understood that the AI detection software is not reliable, the AI has proven to be good enough to give comments, said Graham. This does not mean that AI is better to give comments than humans, but AI is capable of reproducing comments which are also good and just as bad for the comments generated by man, continued Graham. But IA feedback gives us tools that are not often used when teachers’ feedback is given, and it is skepticism.
