Chalking the Lines | By Samina Hadi Tabassum | 9 minute read
K-12 classroom teachers have been using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AIML) for decades.
Imagine a fifth-grade teacher focusing on the Egyptian pyramids as part of a social studies curriculum unit. Since it is physically impossible to take the entire class to Egypt, the teacher instead uses virtual reality goggles for each student to make them feel as if they are in Giza. If a teacher wants her students to better understand American history, she might use the latest version of her program, Oregon Trail Software, to reenact historical events through game simulations. If a third-grade student is learning to read and write, the teacher will put headphones on the child and use a reading software program that instructs the child to read the words aloud into a microphone. The computer algorithm can then tell the child to reread the word. Something that wasn't decoded correctly.
AIML has long been used in classroom environments as a support tool for teaching and learning. However, the current wave of AI-powered academic technologies has raised ethical concerns about their use. There are concerns about the potential for students to use AI tools to create work that was not originally created by them and the potential harm of AI in K-12 classrooms.
Large-scale language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT, have recently made an impact on the education field, especially the emerging problem of cheating. Teachers are proposing strategies to solve these problems in the classroom, and school districts are drafting policies to prevent academic misconduct and the consequences if students are caught plagiarizing. The undetected misuse of AI tools poses a major challenge for educators, especially when they are unfamiliar with student voices. This issue has become overwhelming due to the ease of access to AI technology and rapid advances that outpace the capabilities of detection technology, which is why many school districts are banning AI altogether.
For example, ChatGPT was first released in November 2022 and opens a chatbox where you can ask anything you want to find out. Students can ask her AI tools to write papers on any historical event, solve math problems of any size, summarize class notes, or even create an outline for a long-term project in seconds. Teachers will need to use a sixth sense to determine whether a student's work is truly their own or was generated by an AI, possibly eliminating further subjective biases about students' ability. This may lead to misunderstandings.
AIML – 5 big ideas
However, teachers are also recognizing the potential benefits of incorporating such technology into their education and are proposing to incorporate AI into their curriculum and instructional practices. As AI technology advances and becomes more integrated into our daily lives, the need to improve AI literacy among K-12 students becomes more important. The Artificial Intelligence for K-12 Initiative provides national guidelines for AI education for K-12 teachers, a curated online resource directory to advance AI instruction, and an AI-focused practice for K-12 teachers. A website that provides a community of authors, researchers, resources and tool developers. K-12 audience. Illinois is a state participating in this national conversation, where there is a shared belief that “AI education is important for students of all ages, albeit for different reasons” (AI4K12, 2023) . On this website, he shares five “big ideas” on how to view the use of AI in the classroom.
one big idea Incorporating AI into the curriculum teaches students that computers use sensors to perceive the world, and that perception is the process of extracting meaning from sensory signals. This allows computers to see and hear enough for practical uses, such as helping children read.
big idea 2 That is, computers use data structures to build representations, and these representations support inference algorithms that derive new information from what is already known. AI computer programs can reason about very complex problems, but computers cannot think infinitely like humans.
big idea 3 It teaches students from kindergarten through high school that people learn by observing, being told, asking questions, experimenting, doing, and making connections with past experiences. Humans are natural learners, but computers need to be programmed to learn the way we learn. There are two ways a computer can be programmed to learn. It learns by finding patterns from examples provided by humans, and it learns by trial and error. Even a 5-year-old can understand that computers can replicate the types of learning that humans do.
big idea 4 It focuses on how computers try to imitate human language, such as when asking ChatGPT to write an essay. However, computers have difficulty understanding and producing sentences that utilize metaphors, imagery, hyperbole, irony, humor, and wordplay, so your finished essay, generated in seconds, may sound more like a robot than a human. I don't know.
big idea 5 That means AI has the potential to impact society in both positive and negative ways. AI technology can help you compose emails, let you know if your flight will be on time, quickly translate documents, convert voice to text, even text to speech, and drive self-driving cars across the country. We are changing the way we work by making people mobile.
At the same time, students learn about the potential harms that can occur, such as racial and gender bias in the data used to train AI systems, and human interference that can cause AI systems to malfunction. is needed. For example, if you ask an AI to generate an image of a doctor, it will probably spit out an image of an older white man in a white coat. Since AI is created by biased humans, the images and texts generated by AI will also be biased. Therefore, it is important to develop standards for teachers to ethically design and deploy their AI-based systems in the classroom.
How can AI and AIML be used for curriculum planning?
The university offers professional development for K-12 teachers to incorporate AI into their curriculum and instruction, including assessing AI, understanding AI, and strategically leveraging AI. Many teachers are using AI to create lesson plans that would take hours to create individually on their own, thereby reducing labor costs. Instead, teachers can now focus their time on implementing lesson plans and the skills needed to successfully deliver lessons and activities.
Teachers use AI tools in a variety of ways, including as information providers, idea generators, and lesson plan customizers. A teacher brainstorms more lessons and activities in her ChatGPT than in individual brainstorming, supporting reflective practice toward developing design expertise (Campos, Nguyen, Ahn, & Jackson , 2023).
For AI Curriculum Resources, a team of researchers at the University of Florida designed and developed conversational AI (ConvAI) using both rule-based and generation-based techniques to facilitate math learning for high school and college students. (Li, Zhu, Xiang) & Guo, 2024). Eye-tracking data revealed that participants in the ConvAI group generally showed higher levels of attention than the control group. StoryQ is a free web-based machine learning and text mining technology for K-12 students that explores the historical topic of redlining.
A team of North Carolina State University researchers used StoryQ to develop and implement a week-long curriculum intervention for high school sophomores that was used in the late 1930s for the Homeowners Loan Corporation's Home Security Map. (Concord Consortium), 2024). Researchers claim that teachers can leverage AI to construct historical investigations aimed at identifying patterns in large-scale primary sources (Nocera, Newton, & Shiang , 2024). Integrating AIML into history classrooms has the potential to engage students in critical inquiry and develop analytical skills, especially those that recognize bias in data sources and understand the importance of context and linguistic nuances in historical analysis. there is.
Healthy fusion of AI and human thinking
AI is also being used to develop personalized assessments, such as using prototypes to have algorithms evaluate student writing and provide immediate feedback to students, primarily based on syntax. Grading student papers can be time-consuming for teachers. But if AI can provide feedback on students' first drafts based on grammar and sentence structure, teachers can spend more time thinking about the meaning and semantics of what students are trying to convey in their writing. I can.
Using AI to categorize student data and identify trends and patterns can be helpful for teachers who need to differentiate their lessons based on the summaries at hand. The human perspective that teachers provide is essential and cannot be replaced by algorithms.
Teachers also have practical wisdom that computers can never replace, and they know how much, when, and why AI should be incorporated into the classroom. When students chronically rely on their AI as an alternative means of learning, they are missing out on important opportunities to deepen their own knowledge and develop critical thinking skills. Therefore, teachers must intentionally create classroom lessons and assessments that force students to think independently and reflect for their long-term success and ethical growth and development. The integrity of student outcomes must be at the forefront of the national conversation about when and how to integrate AI into K-12 classrooms.
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