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

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

#61

Post by vundercind »

forgot-im-old wrote: post #10

Unfortunately the Pandora's box has already been opened.., we are going to have to get better at thinking critically and judging evidence if we are to survive into in the sea of LLM generated content.

There’s no guarantee we’ll manage to cope, even socially, with every technology we develop.

I suspect this is one of them. Only expensive private education will be able to avoid regressing in quality. Public schools are already rubbing their hands with glee imagining how many teachers they can lay off or avoid hiring (there’s a staffing crisis) to give half as much money (which will slowly inflate to the same amount) to SV app vendors instead. Zero chance the first attempt at this is gonna be any good, we’re soon going to see something far more damaging than Covid was, for kids’ educations.

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

#62

Post by goosedragons »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #54

I’m wary when ai is presumed to be infallible despite its hallucinations; I’m not sure that’s a great way to teach kids yet. However, I went through the US public school system, so I’m well aware of how useless the average US teacher’s opinion is on basically anything. I also really want to see the institution change because right now everything after elementary is a patronizing, glorified daycare/prison for teenager…

I think there's definitely harm and it doesn't even require teachers to use it. Lazy students will plug anything into chatGPT. Instead of obviously plagiarized unreadable garbage like you used to get, you get coherent AI maybe garbage that's harder to detect. And students not doing the assignment doesn't help them. It's also limiting to require all work to be done in class or oral to try and prevent usage.

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

#63

Post by __loam »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #54

I’m wary when ai is presumed to be infallible despite its hallucinations; I’m not sure that’s a great way to teach kids yet. However, I went through the US public school system, so I’m well aware of how useless the average US teacher’s opinion is on basically anything. I also really want to see the institution change because right now everything after elementary is a patronizing, glorified daycare/prison for teenager…

As someone who also went through the public school system and who was able to get into an ivy league school off of that education, maybe you should show some more respect to the people doing the work of education for shit pay.

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

#64

Post by zero-sharp »

pricees wrote: post #43

My memory is poor, but if I remember anything, it was the apprehension of the establishment over students using Wikipedia as a reference. How can we trust the source when "anybody" can make edits? I am certainly not saying Wikipedia is scripture; however, those fears -- like so many tech fears before and after -- have turned out to be baseless. Now if you'll excuse me, I must go and dust off my Encarta CD-ROM. I want…

Everything can potentially have mistakes, therefore we should rely on computers to do all the thinking for us?

I mean, we're training the AI on own work...

One week ago, Google's AI summary told me I had to drink urine to help pass kidney stones.

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

#65

Post by vundercind »

EGreg wrote: post #28
forgot-im-old wrote: post #10

Unfortunately the Pandora's box has already been opened.., we are going to have to get better at thinking critically and judging evidence if we are to survive into in the sea of LLM generated content.

Won’t help. Superhuman means all your efforts to think critically will be overwhelmed. How exactly do most people fact check today? Take the Donald Trump guilty verdict today. Even without AI, who is thinking more critically, the Republicans who distrust the process or Democrats who welcome it? And your friends will be turned against you by AI influencers if you dare to disagree.

This is a mild view of what’s on the horizon. I’m pretty sure liberal democracy can’t survive in the environment we’re creating. It wasn’t clear it was going to survive iteratively-improving Internet strategies in the first place, and LLMs are like giving a battleship to bad actors and a revolver to anything resembling the truth.

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

#66

Post by irjustin »

layoric wrote: post #52
irjustin wrote: post #45

The shift is coming. Just like the internet changed how kids access information, the old way is out. My wife is an educator and we have long discussions about this. I believe lessons need to be upgraded to require AI and how to interact and prompt it for deeper meaning of more than just "Find the value of the hypotenuse". Something in the form of controlled modules? Testing can stay exactly the same, i.e. no computer…

Given the usage of LLMs to rank answers to questions, I think testing could shift as well. Having an LLM (operating with good faith prompt, eg trying to genuinely discover a level of understanding from a student) have a back and forth with a student to evaluate a level of comprehension of a topic could be more supportive of students than traditional testing. Validation of the LLM to do such a task reliably would be l…

The general issue I have with LLMs in testing is scoring/grading. Since the experience will be different for each test, someone or something will have to grade it individually by reading and "understanding their understanding".

It leaves too much to subjectivity.

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

#67

Post by __loam »

EGreg wrote: post #27
dr_dshiv wrote: post #18

AI is unbelievably awesome for education. We just need to raise the bar. If you only use it to do the normal work (essays), it’s a waste and maybe bad. Now, it is so much easier to teach programming… data analysis… design… all things that k12 is normally terrible at teaching.

I love how HN is just a cheerleader for AI btw. Like the vast majority of posts are all the same. “AI is unbelievably awesome”. “All dangers are overblown and silly.” “We’ve always had X downside, it’s nothing new” “but Web3 sucks in every possible way.”

Also incredible levels of Dunning Kruger effect for fields outside of programming like education.

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

#68

Post by ramblenode »

brotchie wrote: post #40

At the moment, the real killer use-case for the current generation of AI agents (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT) is when you know you don't know something AND you have a specific task to get done. Some examples in past week: 1. Claude: "Why is this code failing typechecking in typescript" -> gives me detailed reasons why, teaches me about some things I didn't know about, and solves the problem for me while uplevelling my un…

> Applying this to education, I think that education needs to pivot explicitly to "solving problems" and not education for educations sake. e.g .The student needs to be engaged with a problem and reaches for AI as a tool to solve it and, as a result, up level their understanding.

It seems you are thinking of project-based learning. That is a great way to learn, but it only works when you have a certain level of baseline knowledge within the "zone of proximal development" to what the task requires. And even then, it does not replace other kinds of learning for developing expertise.

Think of asking a 5th grader to implement the FFT within a programming langauge of their choice. They wouldn't understand the problem, wouldn't know where to begin, and would probably learn very little. But they could still ask Claude or ChatGPT for an answer and there's a good chance it would be pretty close.

For a curious and motivated student, AI is an amplifier---similar to how you were using Claude. But most students just want to finish the task, in which case the more powerful the AI, the less the student needs to know to get a result. These students are not using the AI as a tutor or to fill in gaps in their knowledge. They are just copy-pasting the assignment into the prompt and pasting the output as the answer. That is not learning, and it can be done with projects too.

> If a huge mechanism for assessing folks in education is "write an essay on this" and the teacher then "grades the essay output by the student," that's almost the perfect task where AI can do both ends. Which is pretty much a sign that assessments such as this have low educational impact.

Not at all. It's a sign that AI can do the task.

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

#69

Post by ramblenode »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #17
artninja1988 wrote: post #2

Damn. Only 1 in 4 U.S. Teachers Say AI Tools Do More Harm Than Good in K-12 Education? Better than expected

The other way to look at it is that 3 out of 4 teachers say AI tools do more good than harm. That's not actually what the survey said, they just have a big 35% "unsure" category, but at this point being unsure is the same as supporting AI. "if you're not against us, you're with us"

I don't think law of the excluded middle applies here.

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

#70

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

__loam wrote: post #63
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #54

I’m wary when ai is presumed to be infallible despite its hallucinations; I’m not sure that’s a great way to teach kids yet. However, I went through the US public school system, so I’m well aware of how useless the average US teacher’s opinion is on basically anything. I also really want to see the institution change because right now everything after elementary is a patronizing, glorified daycare/prison for teenager…

As someone who also went through the public school system and who was able to get into an ivy league school off of that education, maybe you should show some more respect to the people doing the work of education for shit pay.

How exactly does your ivy league have any relevance? Anyways, maybe 1 in 7 of my teachers were great people and I appreciate them immensely, but I had so, so many bad teachers. I had several teachers who would throw on vaguely relevant tv every class instead of teaching. Overall, most of them didn’t seem interested in teaching us, nor did they seem very informed outside of the class material. I don’t think they’re terrible people or something, just components of a terrible and underfunded system, but I also don’t trust their opinions on the future of teaching.
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