'Terrible awful no good very bad' advice for teachers

The “AI Guidebook” created by AI for Education for the Chicago Public Schools is "the purest example I've yet of the stupidity running rampant in education right now," writes Benjamin Riley on Cognitive Resonance. Teachers should ignore it.

The guidebook contrasts old-fashioned teaching with the brave, new world of AI-empowered teaching.

All the recommended elementary-school tasks fall "on the spectrum between 'irrelevant' to 'actually quite bad if teachers were to do them',” writes Riley. There's no evidence students will do better with math word problems "customized" to their interests. (Do we want AI to know students' interests?) An AI-generated image of an animal is no more educational than an Internet-provided image of an animal, he writes. "The suggested AI-fueled activities in literacy and social science are just straight up bad, displacing activities where students might actually think and learn new content with pointless exercises that won’t."

By middle school, AI is replacing the math teacher and the science lab, writes Riley. Instead of students interpreting what they read, AI will do the work. "To top this off, using AI image generators to explore cultural heritage is just about the single biggest landmine I can imagine a middle-school teacher stepping on in a classroom – good luck and godspeed to anyone following this terrible suggestion."

Remember when AI produced images of black female Nazi soldiers?

In high school, science students won't have to do experiments, says the guide. AI will simulate experiments, gather data and analyze the results.

Social studies students won't use the internet to research current events. AI will research, analyze and create a "presentation or debate."

Chatbots, which struggle to do simple calculations and explain basic concepts, will help students understand complex mathematical ideas.

Students will “receive instant feedback” on first drafts of their writing, the guide promises. Riley wonders if AI will write the first draft too. After all, AI is doing everything else.

Advice in the "terrible awful no good very bad AI guide" falls into two categories, writes Peter Greene on Curmudgucation. "1) Can be done, but will be more time consuming than just generating materials your own damn self and 2) Cannot be done."

Turkish high school students who use ChatGPT to prepare for a math test scored lower than classmates who didn't use AI, according to a new University of Pennsylvania study, reports Hechinger's Jill Barshay. The AI group got more practice problems right, but they were using AI as a "crutch," said researchers.

In addition, ChatGPT 's step-by-step solutions were often wrong.

A third group of students used a version of ChatGPT that provided hints, but not answers. It had been programmed with the correct solutions. The AI-tutored group solved more than twice as many practice problems correctly compared to the low-tech students, researchers found. But they did no better on the math test.