The Hechinger Report - District 91��Ƭistration

Kids who use ChatGPT as a study assistant do worse on tests

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 16:48:10 +0000

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that Turkish high school students who had access to ChatGPT while doing practice math problems did worse on a math test compared with students who didn’t have access to ChatGPT. Those with ChatGPT solved 48 percent more of the practice problems correctly, but they ultimately scored 17 percent worse on a test of the topic that the students were learning.

A third group of students had access to a revised version of ChatGPT that functioned more like a tutor. This chatbot was programmed to provide hints without directly divulging the answer. The students who used it did spectacularly better on the practice problems, solving 127 percent more of them correctly compared with students who did their practice work without any high-tech aids. But on a test afterwards, these AI-tutored students did no better. Students who just did their practice problems the old fashioned way — on their own — matched their test scores.

The researchers titled their paper, “Generative AI Can Harm Learning,” to make clear to parents and educators that the current crop of freely available AI chatbots can “substantially inhibit learning.” Even a fine-tuned version of ChatGPT designed to mimic a tutor doesn’t necessarily help.

One state radically boosted new teacher pay—and upset a lot of teachers

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 11:21:51 +0000

When Ashlyn Siebert started looking last year for teaching jobs near Decatur — her rural hometown — she knew she wouldn’t make as much as a first-year teacher 16 miles away in Bentonville, home to Walmart’s headquarters.

The story was the same in dozens of other small towns across Arkansas. If teachers wanted to earn more, they had to move to a bigger school district. In Decatur, teachers with a bachelor’s degree made a starting salary of $36,000. Even if they taught in schools for 25 years, they would still earn less than teachers right out of college in Bentonville, who were making $48,755 a year.

But Siebert’s timing was good. In the span of 15 days in early 2023, the state legislature passed a massive education bill, which went into effect that fall. When Siebert ultimately signed a contract to teach in Decatur for the 2023-24 school year, the starting salary had jumped to $50,000. It’s been a huge help at a time when the cost of living has swelled, Siebert said.

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Native Americans turn to charter schools to reclaim their kids’ education

Mon, 20 May 2024 12:31:28 +0000

As their teacher pounded his drums, belting the lyrics to the Native folk rock song “NDN Kars,” middle schoolers Eli, Izzy and Manin rehearsed new guitar chords for an upcoming performance.

“I got a sticker that says ‘Indian Power,’” teacher Luke Cordova sang. “I stuck it on my bumper. That’s what holds my car together.”

Inside a neighboring greenhouse, a group of school staff and volunteers prepared to harvest herbs and vegetables for students to use in medicinal teas and recipes during science lessons on local ecology. Meanwhile, in a 19th century schoolhouse next door, eighth graders in a Native literature class debated the consequences of racism on college campuses. “Remember,” teacher Morgan Barraza (Akimel O’odham, Kawaika, Apache, Thai) told them, “power is not all with the decision makers. You as a community have power, too.”

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Many high school math teachers cobble together instructional materials from the internet, a survey finds

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 13:28:54 +0000

Writing lesson plans has traditionally been a big part of a teacher’s job. But this doesn’t mean they should be starting from a blank slate. Ideally, teachers are supposed to base their lessons on the textbooks, worksheets and digital materials that school leaders have spent a lot of time reviewing and selecting.

But a recent national survey of more than 1,000 math teachers reveals that many are rejecting the materials they should be using and cobbling together their own.

“A surprising number of math teachers, particularly at the high school level, simply said we don’t use the district or school-provided materials, or they claimed they didn’t have any,” said William Zahner, an associate professor of mathematics at San Diego State University, who presented the survey at the April 2024 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Philadelphia. Students, he said, are often being taught through a “bricolage” of materials that teachers assemble themselves from colleagues and the internet.

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Is early childhood education ready for AI?

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 16:23:47 +0000

Interest in artificial intelligence has surged among K-12 and college educators, who are looking at ways it can be used to support both students and teachers. But in the early childhood arena, those discussions are still in the beginning stages. I asked Isabelle Hau, the executive director of Stanford Accelerator for Learning, to share about the potential benefits and challenges of AI in early learning. Our conversation below is edited for length and clarity.

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What happens when suspensions get suspended?

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 11:00:37 +0000

When Abram van der Fluit began teaching science more than two decades ago, he tried to ward off classroom disruption with the threat of suspension: “I had my consequences, and the third consequence was you get referred to the dean,” he recalled.

Suspending kids didn’t make them less defiant, he said, but getting them out of the school for a bit made his job easier. Now, suspensions for “willful defiance” are off the table at Maywood Academy High School, taking the bite out of van der Fluit’s threat.

Mikey Valladares, a 12th grader there, said when he last got into an argument with a teacher, a campus aide brought him to the school’s restorative justice coordinator, who offered Valladares a bottle of water and then asked what had happened. “He doesn’t come in … like a persecuting way,” Valladares said. “He’d just console you about it.”

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Vague school rules at the root of millions of student suspensions

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 10:29:56 +0000

A Rhode Island student smashed a ketchup packet with his fist, splattering an administrator. Another ripped up his school work. The district called it “destruction of school property.” A Washington student turned cartwheels while a PE teacher attempted to give instructions.

A pair of Colorado students slid down a dirt path despite a warning. An Ohio 12th grader refused to work while assigned to the in-school suspension room. Then there was the Maryland sixth grader who swore when his computer shut off and responded “my bad” when his teacher addressed his language.

Their transgressions all ended the same way: The students were suspended.

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Changing education could change the climate

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 12:00:26 +0000

Shiva Rajbhandari doesn’t want you to think there’s anything impressive about the fact that he ran for a school board seat at age 17.

He doesn’t want you to consider it remotely awe-worthy that he campaigned on a platform to turn his Idaho district into a leader on climate change, or that he won, against an incumbent, in the highest-turnout school board election in Boise history.

What’s impressive, he says, are his Boise public school teachers, who educated him on climate change beginning in seventh grade, not because of any state science guidance but because they recognized its importance. They also “told me every single day that your voice is powerful, that you can make a difference,” he said.

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Only a quarter of federally funded education innovations benefited students, report says

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 10:27:03 +0000

Education journalism is chock full of stories touting some brand new idea that could fix schools. Artificial intelligence is the current obsession. Philanthropic funders often say they want to see fewer stories about problems and more stories about solutions. But the truth is that lifting student achievement is really hard and the vast majority of innovations don’t end up working.

A February 2024 report about a research-and-development program inside the Department of Education makes this truth crystal clear. The failure rate was 74 percent. Under this program, called Investing in Innovation or i3, the federal government gave out $1.4 billion between 2010 and 2016 to education nonprofits and researchers for the purpose of developing and testing new ideas in the classroom. But only 26 percent of the innovations yielded any positive benefits for students and no negative harms, according to the program’s final report.

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Is the hardest job in education convincing parents to send their kids to a San Francisco public school?

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 13:32:01 +0000

It was two days before the start of the school year, and Lauren Koehler shrugged off her backpack and slid out of a maroon hoodie as she approached the blocky, concrete building that houses the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Enrollment Center. Koehler, the center’s 38-year-old executive director, usually focuses on strategy, but on this August day, she wanted to help her team — and the students it serves — get through the crush of office visits and calls that comes every year as families scramble at the last-minute for spots in the city’s schools. So when the center’s main phone line rang in her corner office, she answered.

“Good morning! Thank you for waiting,” Koehler chirped, her Texas accent audible around the edges. “How can I help you?”

On the line, Kelly Rodriguez explained that she wanted to move her 6-year-old from a private school to a public one for first grade, but only if a seat opened up at Sunset Elementary School, near their house on San Francisco’s predominantly white and Asian west side. Koehler told her the boy was fourth on the waitlist and that last year, three children got in.

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