Educator’s Notebook #437 (February 11, 2024)
INTRODUCTION
Playful assessment, SAT changes, adolescence today, and more
An excellent week this week.
In today’s features, explore Dan Meyer’s analysis of whether great teachers are made or born. He looks at the performance of students in classes of emergency certified teachers to see if the results were significantly different than those of students in classes by certified teachers. Or look at the article about Dartmouth reinstating the SAT and learn more about what the SAT does and does not do. The Dean of Admissions at Dartmouth discusses this further in an interview in the admissions section.
Also this week, excellent data across several categories on the adolescent experience today. See the social media section for information on teens and social media use: which platforms they use, at what ages, across what demographics, and more. And in the health section, see different assessments of the impact of social media on adolescent mental health. All these plus the adolescence section itself, which shows that e-cigarette use is way down from its 2019 peak, even if we’re not out of the woods yet.
Last, as a school leader, the data that never left my mind is the divergence between household income and the cost of education. Nothing is more existential than this, which shows that the schools are pricing ourselves out of existence by becoming affordable to only a narrower and narrower slice of the population. (I’ve wondered if this is true of all educational settings: public, private, charter, etc.) Finally, I’ve found a graph that clearly shows the data. See below. Ignoring this long term reality is intergenerational negligence and socioeconomic injustice, but solving the problem requires heroic changes. See Scott Galloway’s (typically provocative and/or inflammatory) writing on the topic below in leadership.
These, plus excellent pieces on pedagogy, terrific posts on cognitive science, and a great new video series by xkcd’s Randall Munroe.
Enjoy!
Pete
(The most important graph for every college president and head of school. From Scott Galloway in the leadership section below.)
Find the full archive of over 12,000 curated articles over the past decade at:
FEATURED
Is What We Do And Do Not Teach A Matter Of Civil Rights?
“But the complaint also pinpoints what Pennridge schools teach — and what they prevent students from learning — as a violation of civil rights. The curriculum changes, removal of DEI resources, and other steps to restrict student education on discrimination and its history “created an environment where race- and sex-based harassment can flourish,” the filing says.”
Dartmouth Reinstates SAT Requirement
“Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades — or student essays and teacher recommendations — of how well students would fare at Dartmouth… A second finding was more surprising. During the pandemic, Dartmouth switched to a test-optional policy, in which applicants could choose whether to submit their SAT and ACT scores. And this policy was harming lower-income applicants in a specific way… Many lower-income students, it turned out, had made a strategic mistake… They withheld test scores that would have helped them get into Dartmouth. They wrongly believed that their scores were too low, when in truth the admissions office would have judged the scores to be a sign that students had overcome a difficult environment and could thrive at Dartmouth.”
Are Great Teachers Born Or Made? A Data Informed Theory
“In the first year of the COVID pandemic, two states waived many of their typical requirements for teachers, allowing anyone with a bachelor’s degree to teach. After reviewing end-of-course exam results, supervisor evaluations, and other data, researchers concluded that the students of this group of emergency-hired teachers did not differ significantly from students taught by traditionally licensed teachers.”
ADMISSIONS
“Dartmouth’s Admissions Dean On The Return To Testing”
Population Of 18 Years Projected To Further Decline
ADOLESCENCE
“Overscheduling Kids’ Lives Causes Depression And Anxiety”
E-Cigarette Use Peaked In 2019
Today’s Kids Are Generation Alpha: Born With Screens Everywhere
ARTS
The Grammys Have An Award For Music Educator Of The Year
You’ve Heard Of Bruegel The Elder. Here’s A Close Reading Of One Painting
ASSESSMENT
What Does Grading Look Like - Practically - For An English Teacher
“This is NOT a “martyr” post about how much I graded… More than anything, I wanted to fully capture something that I know is a reality for countless teachers, and to share a bit about what this looks like for me in the current moment.”
Visualizing The Relationship Between Grades, Feedback, And Motivation
What Can Playful Assessment Look Like?
“Kim has spent the past few years developing playful assessments for the classroom, originally with teachers, teacher trainees and game designers at MIT. Where Shute, her mentor at Florida State University, called it “stealth assessment,” Kim prefers the term “playful assessment.””
“The New Digital SAT: 4 Important Details Educators Need To Know”
ATHLETICS
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
“Teaching Self-Assessment Can Support Executive Functioning Skills”
Default Mode: “What Your Brain Is Doing When You’re Not Doing Anything”
Brains Are More Active When Handwriting Than When Typing
CURRICULUM
Taking CS Courses In High School Increases Likelihood Of CS Major
“The study, published as a working paper this month, found that taking a high-quality computer science course in high school increased the chance that the student goes on to major in computer science in college by 10 percentage points, and increased the chance that the student would finish a CS degree program by 5 percentage points.”
HEALTH
What Role Can Students Play In Support Peer Mental Health?
State Of Respiratory Illness In The US, Feb 2024
Is Social Media Actually To Blame For Today’s Mental Health Crisis?
Is More Autonomy The Cure For Student Mental Health Issues?
A Public Health Look At Social Media
HIGHER ED
HISTORY OF EDUCATION
HUMANITIES
Start Thinking About Helping Students Learn To Vote
Nussbaum: “The Humanities Are Alive And Well In Utah”
“I did not look forward to my visit to Utah Valley University in the fall of 2023… I had been invited to lecture to students in the philosophy course that is required of all undergraduates at this huge (more than 43,000 students), open-enrollment public university… How wrong, in retrospect, my reluctance was. In Orem, Utah, I encountered one of the most heartening scenes in higher education that I have ever witnessed in my long career: an overflow crowd of around 150 in the main room and as many in an adjacent room, a crowd of students who were not just marking time — believe me, I know all too well what that looks like. These were students who were really paying attention the entire hour, and who then peppered me with very hard questions for another hour.”
LANGUAGE
LEADERSHIP
PEDAGOGY
Is Relevance To Students Really What Matters Most?
McTighe: Six Hooks For Developing Engaging Class Plans
Would A Talk Meter Help Teachers And Tutors Talk Less?
“The Power Of Student Conferencing”
READING/WRITING
On Eminem’s Writing (And Rhyming) Process
On Reading For Content Vs Reading For Comprehension (At All Levels)
Another Reminder: We Comprehend More When We Read On Paper
SAFETY
SOCIAL MEDIA
“School District Lawsuits Against Social Media Companies Are Piling Up”
“Teens And Social Media Fact Sheet”
“Teens And Internet, Device Access Fact Sheet”
STEM
Scholars Use Skeletal DNA To Track Roman Empire Migration
Randall Monroe From XKCD Started A “What If?” Video Series
SUSTAINABILITY
TECH
WORKPLACE
A.I. Update
A.I. UPDATE
Google's Gemini challenges GPT-4, Deepfakes push ethics questions to the fore
Several major stories this past week:
First, Google has now introduced Gemini to the public, replacing its previous (and unsuccessful) model Bard. Read in several posts below about how Gemini appears to be comparable to GPT-4 in many functions, and how Gemini will be integrated across Google applications, posing the first real threat to OpenAI’s dominance.
Also, a spate of deepfake concerns have arisen both in public and private contexts. While you might have seen the Taylor Swift deepfake story in the popular press, you may not have heard about the story reported from Hong Kong that a live deepfaked video of a CFO on a video call convinced an employee at a large company to wire $25M to scammers.
In schools, see Lance Eaton’s excellent collection on Teaching AI ethics. I’ll be sharing more on this essential topic next week.
Last, for a wonderful story about the interdisciplinary use of AI, read about how scholars have used AI to read scrolls from Herculaneum that have been unreadable for 2000 years. AI’s ability to read these texts promises to unveil something a second Renaissance in which hundreds of hitherto unreadable Roman scrolls will be accessible, opening us to a new trove of classical writing.
We live in extraordinary times.
Enjoy!
Pete
(AI generated image of an ancient scroll found at Herculaneum. Far from accurate, but nice. See the piece in Uses and Applications near the end of this issue for the real thing.)
Find the full archive of over 12,000 curated articles over the past decade at:
TECH/AI: FEATURED
Google’s New Gemini Advanced Is Comparable To GPT-4
“Let me start with the headline: Gemini Advanced is clearly a GPT-4 class model. The statistics show this, but so does a month of our informal testing. And this is a big deal because OpenAI’s GPT-4 (the paid version of ChatGPT/Microsoft Copilot) has been the dominant AI for well over a year, and no other model has come particularly close. Prior to Gemini, we only had one advanced AI model to look at, and it is hard drawing conclusions with a dataset of one. Now there are two, and we can learn a few things.”
Future Directions For Educators With AI In 2024
“Teachers need to focus on enhancing their own critical AI literacy, particularly around what is possible with AI and exposure to the variety of uses available to students. Whether or not a teacher believes AI can or could or should be integrated into their teaching (this choice is highly contextual and differs by teaching philosophy, subject matter, and type of student in their class), they need to be aware of what is available to students for authorized or unauthorized use.”
“Teaching AI Ethics”
“The Teaching AI Ethics series started as a single post covering the nine areas I’d identified as particularly important to education, from bias and discrimination to reinforcing societal power structures. The original post was so popular that I broke it down into nine further posts. Each post includes a detailed discussion of the ethical concern along with links to other articles and resources. There are case studies, discussion questions for a variety of disciplines, and lesson ideas which can be used across the curriculum. Though I designed these posts with a K-12 audience in mind, they’ve since been picked up at a tertiary level for discussions with pre-service teachers and other undergraduate students. I’ve created this page as a single reference point for all 10 posts.”
TECH/AI: EDUCATION
Lance Eaton Uses AI To Summarize Three Recent AI + Education Studies
College Board Guidance On AI Tools For AP Capstone Courses
TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK
“The Case For Open Source AI”
Meta And Other Companies Require AI Image Watermarking
Deepfake Of CFO On A Zoom Call Directs Employee To Wire $25M
“Hong Kong police said at a press conference Friday that the employee at the unnamed firm’s Hong Kong branch initially suspected phishing when he received an email last month purporting to be from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer, CNN reported. However, after attending a video conference and seeing convincing deepfakes of the CFO and other colleagues, the employee believed the request to carry out a secret transaction was legitimate.”
Another Article On The $25M CFO Deepfake Scam
How AI Might Be Used To Influence And/Or Destabilize Elections
“How Taylor Swift’s Experience With ‘Deepfakes’ Can Help Students Examine AI Ethics”
“The Impact Of Generative AI On Black Communities”
TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT
Google Bard Is Now Gemini, Comparable To GPT-4
AI Can Learn Language Like Children
“A team of researchers ran this exact experiment. They trained a multimodal AI system through the eyes and ears of a single child, using headcam video recordings from when the child was six months and through their second birthday. They examined if the AI model could learn words and concepts present in a child’s everyday experience. Their findings, reported in the journal Science, showed that the model, or neural network, could, in fact, learn a substantial number of words and concepts using limited slices of what the child experienced. That is, the video only captured about 1% of the child’s waking hours, but that was sufficient for genuine language learning.”
“How Can Neural Nets Recreate Exact Quotes If They Don’t Store Text?”
Will AI Take People’s Jobs? “We’ve Been Here Before”
“In 1930, the prominent British economist John Maynard Keynes had warned that we were “being afflicted with a new disease” called technological unemployment. Labor-saving advances, he wrote, were “outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” There seemed to be examples everywhere. New machinery was transforming factories and farms. Mechanical switching being adopted by the nation’s telephone network was wiping out the need for local phone operators, one of the most common jobs for young American women in the early 20th century.”
English Major Skills Are More Important Than Ever In An AI Age
TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS
“AI Helps Scholars Read Scroll Buried When Vesuvius Erupted In AD79”
“Papyrologists who have studied the text recovered from the blackened scroll were stunned at the feat. “This is a complete gamechanger,” said Robert Fowler, emeritus professor of Greek at Bristol University and chair of the Herculaneum Society. “There are hundreds of these scrolls waiting to be read.””
Ethan Mollick: “What Can Be Done [With AI] In 59 Seconds”
“Five analytical tasks in under a minute”