When Chat GPT-4 came out, Cory Kohn was itching to bring it into the classroom. Claremont Kohn, who is biology lab coordinator in the Department of Integrative Sciences at McKenna College, Pitzer College, and Scripps College, found this tool useful.
It promises increased efficiency, he claimed. But more than that, it’s important to teach science students how to use this tool for their careers, he first told EdSurge last April. In his view, it would be like familiarizing students with an early version of the calculator, putting students who have never used a calculator at a disadvantage.
Cohn is not the only teacher facing generative AI. He’s enthusiastic about the possibility, but others aren’t quite sure what to think about it.
For companies, artificial intelligence has proven to be extremely beneficial, with some reports even boosting overall profits. Amount of funds flowing into edtech last year. That’s why there’s a frenzied rush to market educational tools as AI. But a desire among some entrepreneurs to use these tools to replace teachers and tutors has sparked skepticism.
Conversations about the ethics of how these tools are implemented have also been somewhat overshadowed, according to one observer. Nevertheless, teachers are already deciding how or whether to implement these tools in their classrooms. And new research shows that the decisions teachers make can be influenced by factors like how tech-savvy they are and even their gender.
disagreement
Stephen Aguilar, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, said people still don’t understand the limits of this bright new technology in education. That, in his opinion, can lead to mistakes such as considering chatbots as replacements for instructors and paraprofessionals. Deploying these tools in this way assumes that rapid and iterative feedback fosters critical thinking. In that case, Aguilar says what students really need is a deep conversation that takes them in an unexpected direction.
For these tools to deliver on their promise to improve education, Aguilar said, we need to go beyond focusing on the tools’ promise of driving efficiency and think deeply about what generative AI can do. thinking about.
Aguilar, a former sixth- and seventh-grade teacher in East Palo Alto, California, currently serves as associate director of the Center for Generative AI and Society. The center announced its establishment. $10 million seed funding, last year. Aguilar said the center is working to chart how AI is reshaping education so it can make useful recommendations for educators. The goal is to truly understand what’s happening on the front lines. That’s because, at this point, no one knows exactly what the main impacts will be, he added.
As part of her role at the center, Aguilar conducted research on how teachers are thinking about AI in the classroom.of study, “How Teachers Navigate the Ethical Landscape of AI in the Classroom,” interviewed 248 K-12 teachers. Most of these teachers were white and came from public schools, which created limitations.
What are the main findings? We found that teachers’ confidence and anxiety about using technology influenced their thoughts about AI.
Perhaps more surprisingly, the study also found that teachers evaluated the ethical implications of these tools differently depending on their gender. The report found that women tend to use more rule-based reasoning when thinking about AI and consider what guidelines they need to follow to use these tools in a beneficial way. . They emphasized the need to maintain privacy or prevent bias and confusion from tools. In contrast, men tend to focus on specific outcomes, such as the ability to be more creative, the report said.
Artificial tools, human judgment
When EdSurge first spoke with lab coordinator Kohn, he was using ChatGPT as a teacher’s assistant in a biology course. He cautioned that human teaching assistants cannot be completely replaced by chatbots. He said the chatbot sometimes missed the mark. For example, when weighing experimental designs with students, I recommend control variables that never made sense. Therefore, its usefulness had to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Kohn, who also teaches a first-year writing course called AI Chatbots in Science, remains optimistic. He said his students use his ChatGPT Plus, a paid version of his OpenAI for ChatGPT, to brainstorm research questions, understand scientific papers, and simulate datasets. Cohn said they also have their writing reviewed by AI.
This aligns with what Aguilar has previously observed about how the chatbot craze could impact writing instruction. Ultimately, Aguilar argues, large-scale language models could be an engaging way for students to reflect on their writing. That’s if students can treat themselves not as writers, but as readers with additional digital eyes that can scrutinize the text, he says. This still requires assessing the feedback students receive from these tools, he added.
These days, Kohn thinks of chatbots as a kind of TA-plus. In addition to the duties of a human TA, she said, they can perform a more diverse range of tasks that would traditionally be performed by librarians and editors, such as helping students scrutinize literature and refine ideas. It is said that we will support you in doing so.
Still, students need to use it wisely, he added: “It’s not a truth-telling panacea.”
