If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, will it make a sound?
Does it matter if a student is writing using AI and no one notices?
To be honest, the latter question is difficult for me to ask as a former journalist here at EdSurge who has built a career on writing. However, AI writing is becoming popular in various professions. Marketers use this in ad copy. A financial analyst who synthesizes information. More than 4 out of 5 of her teachers are using her ChatGPT. AI is also making inroads in industries that have strict standards for human ingenuity. The winner of Japan's prestigious literary award used ChatGPT to write part of his novel.
Just as the technological tools of the business world (laptops, smartphones, the internet) made their way into the classroom, so too did generative AI. And if one of the goals of schools is to prepare children for the afterlife, how do we prepare them for this new world, especially as concerns remain about students' writing skills? Last year, almost half of Texas' fourth-graders earned a zero on the state writing test.
When innovative technology is introduced into schools, old skills and habits are replaced by new ones. Some things, like cursive, aren't often overlooked. Other conveniences come at a price. Typing on a keyboard has largely replaced handwriting, even though research shows the latter is better for memory and learning (and carpal dexterity). Although our eyes are glued to screens these days, reading printed text improves comprehension compared to digital text.
So what do students gain and lose when they write using artificial intelligence?
There is one very real risk here. They may begin to rely on generative AI to the point that it completely replaces their thinking.
For many people, ✋ writing is the most demanding task of thinking. It challenges us to reflect on and test our assumptions, refine our ideas, and discover new ideas. It leads us down a rabbit hole from which we have to crawl back. It requires connecting the dots, thinking about what makes sense and what doesn't, moving back and forth between ideas and evidence, and considering what works and what doesn't. .
When AI is used as a shortcut, some of these muscles are lost and are just as painful to build. This can be a huge setback for the development of young writers.
But not every part of the writing process has to be equally stressful. For example, for students who are writing to develop their thinking, style should be more important than content.Often we worry about how I want to say something before I know what we want to say.
At Carnegie Mellon University, a team of English professors proposed using the concept of “constraint generation AI” to develop a tool for writing instruction. This approach involves building guardrails that allow students to focus on higher-order thinking and the heart of the argument and not worry about accurate sentence construction. For example, one feature converts student notes into rough prose without inserting ideas or opinions, so that the quality of the prose reflects the quality of the notes. This is a new concept and has the potential to help younger students if “AI constraints” can be aligned with grade-level writing standards.
However, each small metacognitive act of constructing a sentence reflects valuable thinking. For example, knowing how to use conjunctions such as “if,” “but,” and “socon” is an important exercise in logical reasoning. To what extent should we outsource this to AI? Too much and the writing experience can feel like a fill-in-the-blank exercise like her MadLibs.
Mastering the art of writing and crafting sound arguments requires not only practice but also instruction. The most formative learning experiences occur when teachers help students solve problems and find the “aha!” The moment everything clicked. But time, or rather lack of it, naturally limits the amount of feedback you can provide and the number of writing cycles you can go through.
Here's one way AI can help create instructions. Reduce the time teachers spend providing feedback throughout the writing process, including planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing, instead of having to wait days or weeks to find out if students are on the right track. died. Some tools allow teachers to set rubrics to guide the grades and feedback provided by her AI. The idea is that the AI can handle basic feedback such as grammar, syntax, and dictionaries, allowing teachers to focus on other important areas.
However, there are limits. A recent study on ChatGPT found that ChatGPT “can perform as well as a human in assigning a final overall score to a student's essay, but is less able to identify and evaluate the structural parts of argumentative writing. It turned out to be difficult.
This highlights the importance of teachers in the process. While AI may be able to provide good Feedback based on rubrics, wonderful Feedback considers the broader context of the student's background, knowledge, and experience. It would be difficult for an AI to know these things better than a teacher.
AI poses many existential questions for education, and today it is reasonable to ask, “Was this assignment written by an AI?” Examples of lazy copy-and-pasting abound, not only in homework assignments and college admission essays, but also in academic research. The reality right now is that humans' AI bullshit detectors are already on full alert, with or without the help of digital AI detection tools.
But that question may soon become as anachronistic as asking if someone used the Internet for help.
“Why would a student use an AI to write this?” A better question for teachers would be, “How did they interact with the AI in the process?” Just as we want our students to verify information they find on the web, they will need the skills and confidence to question, evaluate, and improve what AI produces. This is the next frontier of media and digital literacy.
Teaching these skills is an important job for teachers and is well suited for them. With their help, students can learn how to incorporate her AI in thoughtful ways that preserve human thinking and agency.
