“Students will cheat with AI. But they also will begin to integrate AI into everything they do, raising new questions for educators. Students will want to understand why they are doing assignments that seem obsolete thanks to AI. They will want to use AI as a learning companion, a co-author, or a teammate. They will want to accomplish more than they did before, and also want answers about what AI means for their future learning paths. Schools will need to decide how to respond to this flood of questions. The challenge of AI in education can feel abstract, so to understand a bit more about what is going to happen, I wanted to examine some common assignment types… There is light at the end of the AI tunnel for educators, but it will require experiments and adjustment. In the meantime, we need to be realistic about how many things are about to change in the near future, and start to plan now for what we will do in response to the Homework Apocalypse. Fall is coming.”
“The Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday that ended race-conscious admissions is widely expected to lead to a dramatic drop in the number of Black and Hispanic students at selective colleges. But the court’s decision could have other, surprising consequences, as colleges try to follow the law but also admit a diverse class of students.”
“The paper tried to address one of the most persistent challenges for brain trauma researchers: identifying what aspects of head hits contribute most to C.T.E. They looked at the number of hits to the head, the number of years playing football, the force of those hits and other factors. The best predictor of brain disease later in life, the study found, was the cumulative force of the head hits absorbed by the players over the course of their careers, not the number of diagnosed concussions.”
“One of the first obstacles is a reflexive negativity toward the idea of stopping something. Sloganeering about resilience and grit – “winners never quit and quitters never win,” for example – turn what should be rational decision making into a test of character. If we think of quitters as losers, we’ll err on the side of sticking with something that ought to be abandoned.”
“A 2019 Stanford University study, Students' Civic Online Reasoning: A national portrait, found that two-thirds of students surveyed couldn't differentiate between editorial content and advertising, and 96% didn't understand why a climate-change website funded by a fossil fuel company might be suspect.”
““Programming will be obsolete,” Matt Welsh, a former engineer at Google and Apple, predicted recently… Welsh’s argument, which ran earlier this year in the house organ of the Association for Computing Machinery, carried the headline, “The End of Programming,” but there’s also a way in which A.I. could mark the beginning of a new kind of programming — one that doesn’t require us to learn code but instead transforms human-language instructions into software.”
“A written constitution ratified by the people — and subject to amendment by the people — is an American invention. In the 18th century, people who drafted constitutions and commented on constitutionalism came to agree that if such a strange, new and fragile thing as a written constitution were to endure, it would, as time passed, need to be both repaired and improved, mended and amended. To amend meant, at the time, to correct a fault; to repair an omission; to fix what’s broken; or to improve, in a moral sense: to make something better. The word shares a root, four of its five letters, and almost the entirety of its meaning, with the verb “mend.””
“But human intelligence is as much a product of policies and institutions as it is of genes and individual aptitudes. It’s easier to be smart on a fellowship in the Library of Congress than while working several jobs in a place without a bookstore or even decent Wi-Fi. It doesn’t seem all that controversial to suggest that more scholarships and public libraries will do wonders for boosting human intelligence. But for the solutionist crowd in Silicon Valley, augmenting intelligence is primarily a technological problem — hence the excitement about A.G.I.”
“For any given time since diagnosis, crude annual breast cancer mortality rates and risks decreased with increasing calendar period. Crude five year breast cancer mortality risk was 14.4% (95% confidence interval 14.2% to 14.6%) for women with a diagnosis made during 1993-99 and 4.9% (4.8% to 5.0%) for women with a diagnosis made during 2010-15.”
“The researchers found that students who spent more time in class solving practice problems on their own and taking quizzes and tests tended to have higher scores in math. It was just the opposite in English class. Teachers who allocated more class time to discussions and group work ended up with higher scorers in that subject.”
“Students score higher in math when their teacher devotes more class time to individual practice and assessment. In contrast, students score higher in English if there is more discussion and work with classmates. Class time allocation predicts test scores separate from the quality of the teacher's instruction during the activities. These results suggest opportunities to improve student achievement without changes in teachers’ skills.”
“Readers evaluate the intelligence of an author not only by the quality of their arguments but also by how well they understand what the author is trying to say. Using simple words and sentences makes the point clear. Big words don’t make writing sound intelligent; they make it hard to understand.”
“This summer, K–12 schools must get to work drafting academic policies governing the use of A.I. and facilitating professional development for teachers about the new technology. Educators need to address this trend head-on with students while simultaneously redesigning instruction and assessment in an age of A.I. We cannot start this work quickly enough.”
“The research is clear: Smartphones undermine attention, learning, relationships, and belonging.”
“There was just one hitch: No one — not the airline’s lawyers, not even the judge himself — could find the decisions or the quotations cited and summarized in the brief. That was because ChatGPT had invented everything.”
“Preston Mutanga created a shot-for-shot version of the trailer with animated Lego characters. Then the producers asked him to work on the movie.”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson