When longtime educator Zachary Cote first read about ChatGPT’s release about 15 months ago, his first instinct was to be “concerned” about its impact on the classroom, believing that students would simply He said he was worried about asking the tools to do the job.
He still has that concern, but when he steps back and thinks about it, he also sees ways to “leverage” this tool to further the goal he’s been fighting for for years: social studies education, especially civics education. Almost there. To become more widely known in schools across the country.
Cote is executive director of Thinking Nation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving social studies education, and he saw the application of generative AI in his organization’s work.
He has long argued that U.S. schools have “deprioritised” civics and social studies education in favor of pouring resources into math and STEM fields. One reason for this, he argues, is that it’s easy to measure how much students are learning in math and science using standardized tests that can be quickly graded by machines. He says it’s more complex and time-consuming to measure how much a student has learned, for example, how to weigh his two competing views on a historical event in an essay assignment. .
Over the years, Thinking Nation has built a system that pays educators for feedback on their assignments based on rubrics to make it easier for teachers to assign more nuanced social studies assignments. However, Cote realized that the AI chatbot could be trained on the same rubric and provide the same type of feedback instantly.
“Suddenly, we could provide all the information to students and teachers within seconds, without having to ask teachers to give up their weekends to grade,” he says.
So organizations have incorporated AI essay scoring into: the platforma detailed report is provided on each essay examined, and aspects such as how well the student used textual evidence and how well they used “historical thinking” are scored.
It may seem counterintuitive that the same technology that can hinder student learning could also be used to facilitate student learning. But while Cote agrees that human scoring is better than what bots can do, the reality is that it’s really necessary to help children develop knowledge fluency and critical thinking skills. The reality is that teachers don’t have time to grade as many writing assignments as he thinks. They will need to be competent citizens in our democracy.
“It really depends on the time of day and human buy-in,” he says. “But if we can remove those barriers, we can really change that paradigm and allow teachers to give robust essay assignments with as much knowledge and depth of thought as multiple-choice. It will be.” [test]”
He hopes this will shift the focus from teaching content in subjects like history to teaching critical thinking skills that students can apply to any information they encounter.
Cote isn’t the only one looking to AI to help with civics education. Rachel Davison-Humphreys, senior director of civic learning initiatives at the Bill of Rights Institute, said AI-assisted essay grading gives teachers more time to experiment with the kinds of interactive lessons the organization supports in schools. I hope so.
“One of the activities we do is classroom organization,” she says. “From the moment the students come together as a new community, you say, ‘How are we going to govern ourselves?'”
She says these activities, rather than just focusing on learning a set of facts, give students the citizenship skills they need.
“We need to know things, but we also need opportunities to practice negotiation skills, engagement skills, and the give-and-take skills that occur in conversations,” she says.
Both educators hope that by teaching critical thinking and how to analyze historical events, the conversation will move away from culture war debates about whether and how to teach controversial topics. .
“By moving social studies to a discipline-first approach, content becomes a means to an end, and students have more voice and feel empowered to engage with the content.” Mr. Court argues. “When students read two competing versions of the past and have to make sense of it with analytical questions based on evidence, they feel like they have a say, and they simply have a good perspective. And you realize that it’s not just a bad perspective. It’s subtle. It’s complicated.”
And as AI seems certain to impact democracy, concerns about AI misinformation spread during the current U.S. presidential election are a case in point, and social studies educators are using the latest chatbots to Cote argues that now is a good time to address the potential uses of the technology. In that vein, he recently said,Education, democracy and social cohesion in the age of artificial intelligence” discusses the benefits and risks of AI in civics education.
EdSurge connected with Cote and Davison Humphries This week’s EdSurge podcast.
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