1 in 4 U.S. Teachers Say AI Tools Do More Harm Than Good in K-12 Education

This seems like a bit too far of a leap.

When teaching math, we want students to be able to prove novel theorems. But all the open problems in mathematics are really hard, so teachers often start by getting students to practice on easier theorems that have already been proven.

In this context, something like "prove the Pythagorean Theorem" is a useful exercise and valuable assessment! You just need to make sure the student actually does it instead of copying the answer from the Internet (directly or via ChatGPT).

As an example (not K-12!) my wife is learning Japanese. She's taking a class and the teacher gives her homework, but she also studies on her own, including doing exercises in the textbooks beyond the ones the teacher assigns.

Sometimes she'll answer a question, look it up in the answer key, and find she got it wrong. Previously, she had to wait until the next class and find time to ask the teacher to help her understand her mistake.

But I showed her how to use the ChatGPT phone app to get an explanation right away. She doesn't even have to type it in: just take a picture of the quiz (which is all in Japanese, not English) and ask, "Why is the answer to question 7 'C' instead of 'D'?" And she gets back a detailed explanation of the differences between the two answers and why "C" is a better choice, complete with fresh example sentences and breakdowns of what they mean.

Hallucinations are a risk: she could get back a bogus explanation. So far, that hasn't happened, though. She isn't a total beginner and knows enough to be able to tell whether the explanation makes sense. Each time, her reaction has been something like, "Oh, right, I forgot about that," not, "What? Never heard of that." She also tried it on a couple of questions she'd run by her teacher previously, and got back roughly the same explanations the teacher had given her.

In theory she could just ask it for the answer rather than for an explanation of why her answer was wrong, and it would happily give her a usually-correct response. In her case, that's not a problem because her only goal is to actually learn the language. Cheating would serve no purpose at all. But for a K-12 student who mostly cares about getting a good grade, obviously that's going to be a big temptation.

According to the article:

* 25% more harm than good

* 32% equal mix harm and good

* 35% are not sure

* 6% more good than harm

(Yes, those do not add to 100%, but 98% is close enough.)

I came here looking for a fight, but this article does not back up any use of AI in teaching.

I hope that commentators will write about SPECIFIC ideas they have for AI in education (pro or con).

Right now we are in a situation where (many of) the traditional ways we ask students to demonstrate understanding can be done by a computer.

One important worry I have is that most of the best maths students I know are good at arithmetic/mental math even though we have had replacements for that since the 70s (at least). I think that a deep understanding of the foundations allows for a better ability to abstract. If we roll over everything with an AI, are students really going develop the ability to plan (think abstractly)?

I'm not against using AI's to accomplish something, but I think there's an important piece of intellectual development that comes from fluency (without looking everything up). I know one colleague who gets great mileage out of Copilot, great understanding and great productivity. Unfortunately, there's others who are on the "faking it" end of the spectrum - definitely net negatives even when they manage to produce working code.

If you're arguing that LLM's are the future of programming, I won't disagree, but please spend a few sentences imagining how people trained in that world (not the one you trained in) might see things in very very different ways.