“Educational Impacts of AI”

By Scott Hamilton

Last week I wrote about the negative effect that going fully digital had on Sweden’s education system. They saw a decline in students’ ability to read and comprehend the material when utilizing a screen instead of a paper book. This week I wanted to touch on a similar topic. How is artificial intelligence (AI), large language models (LLM) to be more specific, impacting our education system? Considering that LLM is a step above ebooks from a level of impact it seemed an interesting topic.

“Psychology Today” released an article on this very topic last August and covered quite a few interesting points. In fact, they went so far as to say that teachers of the English Language Arts should be losing sleep because of the harmful effects of AI. I agree fully with their assessment, being a teacher of high school history myself and seeing what students today are capable of generating with the help of AI. I am seeing some history papers written at the doctoral thesis level coming from students that seem to struggle comprehending the assigned reading material.

You might begin to wonder how struggling students can produce seemingly excellent written reports, until you experiment a little with AI for yourself. There are three main contenders in the AI marketplace, Google’s ChatGPT, Claude AI, and Microsoft’s CoPilot. All three can be very useful tools for research, but when used beyond that they can hinder a student’s grasp of the material as well as providing extra help.

Imagine for a minute the science fair. For years we have seen a gap between students that received a lot of help from parents and those who worked on their own. Now imagine a parent doing a complete report for a student, only this parent has immediate access to all the research on the topic and the ability to create perfect grammar and structure of the paper. You might easily see that the student did not do their own work. This is the first problem with AI. Nearly anyone, even with little computer skills, can generate a paper via AI that is written at the college level with only speaking a few words to the AI.

Let me give you an example. When I was in school we had a weekly theme for our English class. It was supposed to be a minimum of three double-spaced, handwritten pages, front and back, and it usually took a few hours to complete. If a student today were given the same assignment, they could simply start by asking ChatGPT, Claude, or CoPilot, “Can you provide a 360-word essay on why AI is dangerous?” and in a matter of seconds have the complete text of an essay on the topic. The really crazy part is they could also add the phrase, “Can you rewrite this at a fifth grade writing level?” and make it seem more at grade level. Each time a student asks for this particular topic, a different and seemingly random essay will be generated, making it nearly impossible for the teacher to know if the student completed the work.

Not only are the AIs capable of writing the essays, they are capable of summarizing reading assignments, answering homework questions and reading books aloud for students with reading disabilities. While this may seem like it helps the students, it has been shown to decrease their vocabulary skills. Several studies have proven that students learn most of their vocabulary from reading and not from instruction. The same studies showed that the frequency of reading had a direct correlation to academic achievement across subjects. Allowing AIs to read and write for you not only vastly decreases your ability to read and write, it also impacts your ability to learn other subjects and to retain information.

They have also proven that the less you read, the more effort it requires when you read and the less likely you are to read more. It is a clear sign of practice makes perfect; the less you read the harder it is. So why is reading important? It helps build your vocabulary, increases your word choices when writing and communicating, and improves your own sentence structure. You might say that over-use of AI results in less intelligent students; even though they have greater access to information than any previous generation, they are losing the ability to comprehend and effectively utilize the information and AI is making the problem worse.

Until next week stay safe and learn something new.

Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to sh*******@te**********.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.