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2024 - The Year Teacher’s Take Back AI?
The PEN Weekly
March 06, 2024
What to expect this week:
5 min read
ChatGPT - What am I supposed to do with this???
Are my students ACTUALLY cheating?
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Tech Talk
Kicking it off with (probably) the tech tool of the decade - ChatGPT.
Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash
Since its public launch in late 2022, students (and professionals of every kind) have been using it to accelerate and erhm…collaborate… on their tasks and assessments. Gaining over 100 million users in just a few short months, this tech monster is here to stay. But with nearly half of all post-secondary students having used it (according to this Better Colleges article), it’s time the educators got in on the action. We’re not talking about AI checking tools to see if your learners have been tempted. Instead, we’re talking about how YOU can use it (safely) to better your teaching practice. Grade level doesn’t matter for this one - simply adjust as necessary.
OpenAI, the parent company behind ChatGPT, even sees this value, and posted some great teacher-only ideas in their blog. You can read the whole version here. Some suggestions they have:
👋Get some prompts for how to steer a challenging conversation. Parent phone calls? Academically struggling student? Tough topic to make a lesson on? Pretend you’re actually IN that conversation and let ChatGPT pretend to be on the receiving end. Practice makes perfect!
✍️Use ChatGPT to build test questions and lesson ideas. Simply ask the chat bot to give you any amount of questions about a topic. Or better yet, copy and paste some of your lesson text within it and ask it to spit out some example questions. Always, always, always, review them - it’s good but it’s not 100% accurate all of the time. Still a great place to start!
🌍ESL, ELL, and other students struggling with writing in English? Encourage them to use ChatGPT as a more friendly translating service under the supervision of your lessons. Yes, Google Translate is great for individual words, but ChatGPT treats everything as a conversation in a native tongue.
This only scratches the surface of what ChatGPT can do for us as educators. It’s time we take it back! Future weeks will continue to explore new tools/ideas as they become available.
“If we teach today how we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow”
Brainy Bits
AI vs. Math Exams - a fair fight?
Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash
Ever wondered how AI stacks up against good old-fashioned math exams? Well, we've got the scoop for you in this week's Brainy Bit! 🧠
So, picture this: Guler et al. (2024) decided to put ChatGPT, that chatty AI bot, to the test. They wanted to see how well it could handle national math exams from their country (Turkey). But why is this worth your read? Well, with AI becoming a big deal as we saw above, there's a worry that students might use it to cheat on their exams. Sneaky, huh? This study wanted to find out if ChatGPT could actually help students get the right answers, even if they didn't know the math themselves.
Okay, here's the lowdown: they tested two versions of ChatGPT - the regular one (version 3.5) and the fancy, upgraded version (version 4). They gave them some tough math questions from real exams and watched how they did. At first, ChatGPT 3.5 only got about a third of the answers right, while ChatGPT 4 did a bit better, managing 40%. Not bad, but not perfect, right? 🤔
But wait, there's more! The researchers didn't stop there. They decided to give ChatGPT a bit of a pep talk. They asked it to explain its thought process step-by-step, just like a teacher would with a student. And guess what? It worked like a charm! After this chat session, ChatGPT 3.5 bumped its score up to almost 90%, and ChatGPT 4 aced it with a perfect score. Talk about improvement! 🎉
Now, let's break it down a bit more. The questions on these exams weren't just your run-of-the-mill math problems. They covered all sorts of tricky topics, like probability and applying math to real-life situations. ChatGPT struggled with these kinds of questions at first, but with a little guidance, it managed to crack them. It's kind of like when a student doesn't quite get a concept in class, but after some one-on-one time with the teacher, it finally clicks! 🤓
So, what's the takeaway? Well, using AI as a quick fix might not always give the best results. But if students treat it like a study buddy, asking questions and getting explanations, it can be super helpful. And hey, as AI gets smarter, who knows what other tricks it'll have up its sleeve? Stay tuned for more updates - we'll be here to spill the tea! ☕️
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References
This week’s issue adapts information from the following sources:
Welding, L. (2023, March 17). Half of college students say using AI is cheating: BestColleges. BestColleges.com. https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-students-ai-tools-survey/#:~:text=Half%20of%20College%20Students%20Say%20Using%20AI%20on%20Schoolwork%20Is,in%205%20use%20them%20anyway.
OpenAI (2023, August 31). Teaching with AI. https://openai.com/blog/teaching-with-ai#OpenAI
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