When Zachary Cote, a longtime educator, first read about ChatGPT's release about 15 months ago, he says his first instinct was to be “concerned” about its impact in the classroom, worried that students would simply ask the artificial intelligence tool that will work for them.
He still has that concern, but when he took a step back to think about it, he also saw a way to “leverage” the tool to achieve a goal he had long fought for: helping social studies education, and especially teaching civics to greater prominence in the country's schools.
Cote is the executive director of Thinking Nation, a nonprofit dedicated to improving social studies education, and saw an application of generative ai in his organization's work.
He has long argued that American schools have “deprioritized” the teaching of civics and social studies, in favor of pumping resources into math and STEM fields. One reason for this, she maintains, is that it is easier to measure how much students are learning in math and science by using standardized tests that machines can quickly score. It's simply more complex and time-consuming, she says, to assess how much a student has learned about, for example, how to weigh two opposing views of a historical event in an essay assignment.
For years, Thinking Nation has set up a system in which it paid educators to provide feedback on teachers' assignments, based on a rubric, to make it easier for them to assign more nuanced social studies assignments. But Cote saw that an ai chatbot can now be trained with the same rubric to instantly provide the same type of feedback.
“Now, suddenly, without asking teachers to spend their weekends grading,” he says, “we can get all that information to the student and the teacher in a matter of seconds.”
For this reason, the organization has incorporated ai essay grading. technology/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>your platformwhich provides detailed reports on each essay reviewed, grading aspects such as how well the student used textual evidence and how well the student used “historical thinking.”
It might seem counterintuitive that the same technology that threatens to hinder student learning can be used to boost it. But while Cote agrees that human grading is superior to what a robot can do, the reality is that teachers don't have time to grade the amount of essay work that he believes is really necessary for kids to acquire. fluency in knowledge and critical thinking skills. They will have to be effective citizens in our democracy.
“It really depends on the hours of the day and human acceptance,” he says. “But if I can get rid of those barriers, now I can really change that paradigm and I can make it as convenient for a teacher to give a solid essay assignment with a high level of knowledge and deep thinking as a multiple choice (test) could. “
He hopes this can spark a shift in focus from teaching content in subjects like history to teaching critical thinking skills that students can apply to any set of information they encounter.
Cote isn't the only one pinning hopes on ai to help teach civics. Rachel Davison Humphries, senior director of civic learning initiatives at the Bill of Rights Institute, hopes ai-assisted essay grading will give teachers more time to try out the types of interactive lessons her organization supports in schools.
“One of the activities we do is classroom constitution,” he says, “where from the moment the students come together as a new community, you walk in and say, 'How are we going to govern ourselves?'”
She says it's those types of activities, rather than simply focusing on learning a set of facts, that give students the skills they'll need as citizens.
“We need to know things, but we also need to have the opportunity to practice the negotiation skills, the compromise skills, the give and take skills that happen in a conversation,” he says.
Both educators hope that teaching critical thinking and how to analyze historical events will move the conversation away from culture war arguments about whether and how to teach controversial topics.
“By shifting social studies toward a disciplinary focus, where the content is a means to an end, that really elevates students' voices and allows them to feel like they can interact with the content,” Cote argues. “When students read two competing versions of the past and have to make sense of them with these analytical questions through evidence, they feel like they have a voice and realize that it's not just about the good perspective versus the bad perspective, but It has nuances. It is complex.”
And since ai seems certain to have an impact on democracy (for example, concerns about ai-generated misinformation circulating during the current US presidential election), Cote argues that it is a good time for social studies educators grapple with the potential uses of the latest chatbot technology. In that sense, he recently was part of a working group that prepared a report on “Education, democracy and social cohesion in the era of artificial intelligence”which lays out some benefits and risks of ai in civic education.
EdSurge connected with Cote and Davison Humphries to ai-give-civics-education-a-boost?in=edsurge/sets/edsurge-podcast-latest” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>This Week's EdSurge Podcast.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Cloudy, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page.
