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

> 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.

This seems like a bit too far of a leap.

When teaching math, we want students to be able to prove novel theorems. But all the open problems in mathematics are really hard, so teachers often start by getting students to practice on easier theorems that have already been proven.

In this context, something like "prove the Pythagorean Theorem" is a useful exercise and valuable assessment! You just need to make sure the student actually does it instead of copying the answer from the Internet (directly or via ChatGPT).

I hate listening to tech people talk about education like it's some problem to be solved. Using a system that you know is wrong 10% of the time for education is a terrible idea. We're trying to teach things like basic literacy and cultural contex. School does not exist for the sole reason of pumping of good little tech workers. Some things are actually hard to measure and AI being able to put out a convincing looking essay doesn't mean the act of writing essays has no value for the student. The goal was not the production of an essay.

I am in school currently and have had students sitting next to me use ChatGPT to help with some in class quizzes, we are allowed to use other resources, so it wasn't cheating. For some of the questions, ChatGPT was flat wrong when analyzing code. One specific question was asking where errors were in a block of code by line number, ChatGPT gave the wrong line number and wrong number of lines on top of that. The student actually knew how to answer the question, but didn't want to think. In a different class, a prof said she knew some students were using ChatGPT because the errors some students made were the same errors ChatGPT made and they were kind of dumb mistakes if you knew what was going on.

I don't mean to say your experience isn't possible nor a fluke. What I mean to say is, if you don't know something, ChatGPT shouldn't be your only resource, you won't know when it's wrong.

edit: words, spelling

> 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.

The problem is that you have a sense of what a correct and what an incorrect answer is.

When you go and ask it for some assembly code ChatGPT will happily mix Intel and ARM instructions.

And if you don't have a frame of reference you can spend quite a big amount of time figuring out what is wrong.

They gave us the go-ahead at work last week so I tried to use ChatGPT today on a task. It failed, and failed, and failed, over and over again. I kept prompting it, telling it where it was wrong, and why it was wrong, and then it would say something trite like, "Got it! Let's update the logic to reflect $THING_I_SAID_TO_IT..." and then it would just regurgitate the exact same broken code over and over again.

It was an absolute waste of my time. I quite like it when I need to get some piece of weird information out of it about the Python standard library or whatever but whenever I try to get it to do anything useful with code it fumbles the bag so hard.

> 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.

Disagree here. AI can be (theoretically) trained to do any tasks with which it has an IO interface to perform the task. The same goes for humans, they can't inherently prove they "know" the information, they have to show it, via an IO interface (their hands/voice).

As such, any metric for proving human knowledge could be gamed by AI, assuming an environment where AI could be used (i.e. at home). The only places where AI can be controlled is in the classroom, like during exams or in-person activities.

So to conclude activity X has "low impact" because AI can do it, implies that all education at home has low impact, because AI could do it (through a human performing verbatim what it instructs, ignoring any explanation the AI might give).

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.”

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'm just a LLM and I'm still learning. I'm afraid I cannot give an opinion on a potentially divisive topic like education, because education is an important part of development of a properly adjusted human being whilst my probabilistic hallucinations are paid for with the taxpayers money which has a history of being a medium of transfer of value and values are an important device in the process of creation of a cohesive society where temperature gradient of knowledge corpora used to construct recombined outputs leads to non-aligned conclusions that may or may not cause distress..."

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 large undertaking, but seems like something that might be possible in the future.

>We're building an AI grading assistant for teachers

So students will be generating papers with AI and teachers grading them with AI? Maybe the real problem is education and teaching isn't innovating as fast as tech

Can't remember where but saw a comic not too long ago when an employee uses AI to generate a long email and the recipient uses AI to summarize it

> most of the best maths students I know are good at arithmetic/mental math even though we have had replacements for that since the 70s (at least).

Well, consider (for example) the SAT. It used to have math sections both with and without a calculator. Then COVID hit, and e.g. MIT discontinued SAT altogether - now the SAT is back, but all digital and the math section is all-calculator. To me this suggests that computers have integrated into society to the point where one's ability without them is seen as irrelevant. This isn't to say that there aren't holdouts who still advocate traditional pen-and-paper testing, just that they are no longer mainstream. Similarly, I would say for programming, if the questions you are asking to determine if they understand "the foundations of programming" can be easily answered with Copilot or ChatGPT, they are probably bad questions.

As far as teaching, there has always been strong evidence that people can learn math effectively just by playing with their calculators. http://ti-researchlibrary.com/Lists/TI%20Education%20Technol... I certainly learned a few things that way. It is the same way with Copilot - you can actually learn a lot of programming just by playing with it and seeing what "real code" looks like. When you mention fluency, I think you forget how it works - first you write things, then you get used to it and become more fluent. Copilot assists greatly with that first step of learning.

Now it is true, some teachers aren't really good with the Socratic method and other techniques of fostering self-guided learning, but if it is a binary "full access / no access" I would argue full access is better, like how students can apparently use their phones to goof off in class all day without any repercussions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495673). There are people who will misuse the access but it is not clear if they would learn anything even without access - it could be that they would just find other ways to ignore the teacher. And meanwhile the rest will benefit significantly - they can look up concepts, ask ChatGPT questions, etc.

And as far as "deep understanding" and the "ability to think and plan abstractly", barely anybody has that, that is not taught in schools. I mean sure there is the watered-down definition of "solve word problems and write essays" or whatever passes for understanding these days, but most of the kids coming out of school are nowhere near the next Einstein, even if they got straight A's. edit: maybe the ability to plan is taught in military training, it's certainly not part of a regular school curriculum.

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.

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.

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.

Number munchers, Oregon trail, Odell Lake, Rocky’s Boots, LOGO, Carmen San Diego…

My 1980s education technology was kick ass

I think it really depends on how the institution has invested in the stuff. If they have one or more teachers who know and understand what they're doing, or some pretty good software and curriculum already setup it's great.

But if you buy a bunch of computers or whatever and some crap software and don't execute well it's not going to go good.

(Source: like half my family is/was a teacher or school administrator)

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.

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.

>This is the modern equivalent of saying "keyboards hurt education, penmanship education is suffering."

Ironically if I had listened to my teachers more I wouldn't be peck typing as a programmer and my penmanship would be more like cursive than the chicken scratch that I currently write.

I get you're going for the "AI is a tool" thing, but the problem with your analogy is that LLMs hallucinate and many students use them in lieu of doing reading and reasoning about the content.

LLMs are to english class as a car would be to running class. Yes, the tool exists and is useful but it prevents you from getting the intended benefit.

I don't think our existence should be dictated by economics. There are certain skills, creative and analytical, that should be practiced even when there is no economic incentive to do so. I actually think the idea of a chatbot solving your math homework or shitting out an essay is seriously regressive. Like, sure, if you instead train students to coax AI into producing "an answer", they might be able to find work. But they also missed the opportunity to practice certain cognitive skills that would enable them to develop their own ideas. Not everyone can be a specialist (or needs to be). But at the same time, they should not be handed a crutch from the get-to which discourages independence and practice.

That's not to say that there aren't certain repetitive tasks that can benefit from technology. But have you ever had a numerical problem on a calculator? Do you realize how often technology can lead to bad math? It happens a lot. If you blindly follow wolframalpha, you'll get things wrong. And you'll have absolutely no idea why.

A solid group were unsure. Just reading Hacker News will show you that there are significant numbers here very enthusiastic about AI and others (probably with overlap) very concerned about where it's going. Just read any Sam Altman thread.

I'd guess that most teachers would welcome AI augmenting their teaching. They're already doing more than they were 1-2 decades ago in terms of dealing with parents and reporting on curriculum (e.g., Seesaw app), at least where I live. AI isn't going to take jobs in childcare, kindergarten and early primary schools any time soon. I also don't think it would do more than augment teaching in the rest of primary school or high school.

Teachers would jump on an AI that helped them summarise daily and weekly activities for broadcast to parents. That must be such a grind doing it now.