Legion post talk addresses artificial intelligence in schools
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Haddonfield American Legion Post 38 hosted its final community conversation of the season on May 27 to focus on AI and its impact on education.
About 50 people were there, including mayor Dave Siedell. The talk was led by Linda Hochgertel, vice president of the school board; Ojobo Agbo Eje, an AI researcher at Rutgers University; Gino Priolo, assistant superintendent of schools; and two Haddonfield Memorial High School students, junior Luke Patterson and sophomore Talia Seshasai.
Seshasai said one of the benefits of AI she’s seen has to do with studying.
“AI is a tool that can basically make as many practice questions as you want,” she explained. “And it can respond to you, can teach you topics that you might still be struggling with. And I’ve also noticed that many teachers in my classes have encouraged me to use it in this way.”
But Seshasai has also seen students use AI for homework or other assignments.
“A student comes home, and they have a homework assignment in every class,” she explained. “But then they have a math test the next day, a history test the next day. They’re more likely to use AI on their science homework or on an English worksheet that they have to complete, so that they can spend more time studying for the math test or the history test to overall get a better grade.”
“When students come home with hours of homework and they’re overwhelmed by assignments and tests and other things that are being asked of them by their teachers,” Seshasai believes, “they’re much more likely to use AI.”
Patterson said some of his teachers respond to AI overuse by assigning work in class and on paper. For one unit of AP U.S. history, his teacher gave the students paper with excerpts from historical philosophers, a dictionary and a notebook.
But students still struggled, he added, a sign they may lack critical thinking skills.
“I think probably about half the students in this class,” Patterson added, “again one of the highest-level history classes that’s offered, we’re just kind of in shock and really struggling with just sitting there for 30 minutes reading an except and answering questions just solely with your own brain power and writing about it.”
Priolo addressed a recent survey conducted by the district that he said will inform any AI policy he presents before the board by the end of July. Hochgertel, meanwhile, would like to see the technology used more often in class.
“If someone on my teams comes to me with a problem and I think they could have used AI to think through it and brainstorm and get some answers,” she noted, “I get really annoyed at them. There’s a powerful tool at their fingertips. They need to be using that tool.”
But AI also has drawbacks that Hochgertel laid out in her presentation.
“When you use it to shortcut everything, you don’t learn,” she related. “So if you say, ‘Write a five-paragraph essay on the Civil War,’ it (AI) will do it. And you learned nothing. And I will tell you teachers … spot AI slop. So they (students) are handing things in and there’s no fidelity, and you didn’t do the work and it’s a shortcut.
“And you haven’t learned anything.”
Students who use AI but not their own work, Hochgertel added, are cheating.
“They have to be able to struggle,” she said of students. “It’s the struggle where you get the learning. We need students to develop those critical skills and they have to understand that while what is output can look really impressive, they’re turning in something that is frankly not their own work.”
Eje said that he tries to get students to look at both sides of the AI debate.
“People choose to live in their informational echo chambers,” he observed. ” … So part of the work that I do is to create environments and platforms for discussion … to make sure everyone is brought to the table and everyone is brought up to speed.”
Eje pointed to the amount of time teachers spend on administrative work as something AI could replace.
“With artificial intelligence built into certain systems, teachers are able to come up with lesson plans that generally align to the policies of the educational board …” he said. “They’re able to also in some cases do some grading. For example, we use a platform that is called Canvas at Rutgers.”
But in April, the platform was hit with a cyberattack that threatened to expose personal data from almost 9,000 schools worldwide and locked students and teachers out for a time. Infrastructure, Canvas’ parent company, “reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor” on May 11.
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