Philly students are using AI tools to write essays. Can they do it responsibly?

In countless high-school classrooms currently the rise of artificial intelligence tools is quietly reshaping what it means to put pen to paper Students are increasingly using AI assistants to brainstorm ideas draft paragraphs even polish final versions of essays raising questions about authorship skill expansion and fair assessment Affair in point That last paragraph was generated through ChatGPT So with these new tempting writing shortcuts where it s practically impossible to judge the difference between what was written by a human and what s not how are students and teachers in Philadelphia navigating It s a little idiosyncratic commented Amy Stornaiuolo a professor of mentoring at the University of Pennsylvania who researches AI in schools It s up to the individual instructor how they want to take up AI in any particular way There s not like a university-wide or even a school-wide set of guidelines or mandates or rules or approaches In other words AI mechanism has arrived at such a breakneck pace it s hard to keep up I work primarily with teachers and students Stornaiuolo reported I work a lot with young people and how they might be using it in their everyday lives both in and out of school And I kind of hear the same story which is that they don t get a lot of guidance They might have a facilitator who is kind of up to date with it but in general schools themselves tend not to be having a unified message In Common Sense Media conducted a analysis which indicated that half of students between and years old communicated using ChatGPT for schoolwork declared they did so without permission from their tutor and reported they knew a friend or classmate who had used the innovation And that was two years ago So whether teachers and schools are ready to alter their curriculum to factor in AI or not multiple students are already relying on the mechanism There is particular early content that indicates that using AI in the classroom or for writing and communication allegedly will or does displace key moments of improvement that build the skills that allow us to do increasingly laborious tasks stated Kris Perry the executive director of Children and Screens an organization that educates about kids and tech with events webinars podcasts and more MIT very not long ago ascertained when students wrote essays with LLMs large language models it produced lower levels of brain activity than if they had written it without any assistance at all Perry explained Artificial intelligence could have a negative impact on aspirant s independent creativity If you repeatedly use a tool that s designed to do analytical work for you it just reduces the brain activity and what specific people refer to as the inter region of the brain where that deep thinking would usually occur Perry stated And it s displacing the improvement of that area by offloading the cognitive effort onto the tool So the tool you might say is expending the effort and the participant isn t What s more if students are using AI to generate their work they may feel less satisfaction and sense of ownership when they eventually finish that essay and hand it in Right to be concerned When it comes to AI parents are right to be concerned according to Stornaiuolo and the best way to address that concern is to get informed For parents really understanding the policies around AI for the schools that their kids are in would be really essential she commented There s a lot of really very serious ramifications of using it in particular solutions that I think being informed about would be really helpful Penn professor Amy Stornaiuolo Courtesy of Amy Stornaiuolo Stornaiuolo s research company is intergenerational meaning that while she studies high school students she s also working with high school students Angelina Vo has been working on Stornaiuolo s WAi Writing with AI research association over the last year She s a senior at East High School in West Chester As a high school scholar I feel like I ve kind of experienced the positive and the negatives Vo mentioned of her AI usage When she first began experimenting with AI tools she would rely on it to generate content for writing assignments as a way to maximize her time When I was going through applications for summer programs I realized that I had absolutely lost my style and my personality in my writing she revealed I kind of had to go back and discover Where did I go wrong She had lost those quirky vocabulary words she liked to use and revealed that her sentence and paragraph structures felt foreign I had to go back and look at old assignments that I did and kind of try to regain how I used to write Vo commented Using AI responsibly Conversations around AI in schools are often tinged with a sense of fear but Stornaiuolo s research shows that teenage usage of the mechanism is nuanced At the core is that tension she explained which is How to create A lot of my fellow classmates are misusing AI and letting it think for them Vo noted whereas I feel like there s a way that you can use AI responsibly and keep your own thoughts But what does responsible AI use look like We talk about boundary-making practices in our work Stornaiuolo stated Boundary-making practices that students engage in are things like I only upload small parts of it and not the whole thing to get specific kinds of feedback or I keep it in a separate window so I can keep it separate from my real writing and see what it does with my writing over here but not let it infect particular people use that term my original writing The unit is also monitoring how AI might affect students from different socioeconomic backgrounds There s a disproportionate number of students from marginalized identities and communities who are accused of using AI when they have not Stornaiuolo announced Selected teenagers that she has spoken with are so concerned about getting accused of cheating that they don t use AI tools at all Kids from higher socioeconomic status families have parents that have more options for distracting them Perry mentioned Putting them outside in the real world supervising them controlling their devices giving each child its own individual device and controlling it whereas children from lower-income homes may be sharing a device with an older child parents that are working multiple jobs not in a safe neighborhood where they can be outside away from the device In other words kids from higher socioeconomic backgrounds might receive more learning on how to use new technologies responsibly Letting teens guide their future Whether we like it or not AI is here and is shaping the future of how writers write The adolescent brain is still not fully developed Perry explained It s at a very sensitive point in fact in rise a little like early childhood where the executive function of the frontal lobe is not fully formed Still she doesn t think that means that teens should have their agency taken away This is their future Perry declared They do hold the power to go online and use the tools before they re safe They can encouragement each other in understanding what they are what they aren t and how they ll impact their brains Research shows that letting them shape the path forward might be the best approach to getting them interested in responsible AI use A inquiry from the Brookings Institute revealed that students feel more engaged in their studies when they are given particular freedom and say in their curriculums and projects We recommend that educators including state districts and school leaders alongside teachers and other coaching personnel find techniques to maximize students opportunity to explore the analysis disclosed Perry echoed this idea Children s safety was not top of mind when they developed these products she mentioned This is a great opportunity for the youth to step up and lead and advocacy each other in slow-walking this while they work out a few of the safety issues that have already cropped up with the products Certainly Stornaiuolo s intergenerational research association is championing this idea I think that we can trust teenagers Vo reported We have to teach people across all ages This is a new thing that we re being introduced to So everybody is going to have questions about it questions about whether they should or should not use it If people are taught about it if they re more aware about how it can change your writerly identity or impact this and that then they may be more mindful of how they use it The post Philly students are using AI tools to write essays Can they do it responsibly appeared first on Billy Penn at WHYY