Evanston Township High School is one of many educational institutions working with teachers to make sure they are equipped to use artificial intelligence tools, or allow students to use them, in the right way.
According to an EdWeek Research Center survey, a third of K-12 educators say they have used AI tools in their classrooms, although the number who use them regularly is only around 2%. These tools can help teachers do anything from rewrite test questions to help grade assessments.
“I think we see a lot of positive or potential for helping with lesson plans, redefining their assignments, potentially grading and looking at ways to make things a little more efficient and/or give students more opportunities to get feedback,” ETHS director of instructional technology David Chan told the RoundTable.
These tools have their downfalls, though – with varying accuracy, they don’t always serve teachers or students efficiently. Teachers also have to account for students using these tools as crutches for their own work, potentially diminishing their learning.
No official policy yet
Chan and the instructional technology team at ETHS are working to give teachers guidance on how to use AI successfully in their classrooms. He described this as a multiyear process, and that it might be some time before the school has an official policy on the tools available.
He’s seen a variety of different reactions to AI tools, and they aren’t necessarily age dependent. There have been near-retired teachers thrilled about the possibilities, and others who are hesitant.
“We’re continuing to have these dialogues,” Chan said. “I appreciate the work that teachers are doing.”
“We have teachers who have totally redefined what they’re asking, how they’re asking their students to do certain assignments, and so that it relies more on a human, you know, a person actually thinking through,” Chan said.
New tool, new questions
He described one teacher who allowed students to use AI in a biology project to help come up with hypothetical new animals that would meet certain criteria. This kind of question differs from something like asking for five facts about a biology environment, and avoids students just looking up those facts online.
In this instance, AI helped students brainstorm new ideas in the scope of topics they were learning about.
“They do have to kind of think and add a personal point of view, add, you know, perspective,” Chan said. “Do things that we know, at least as of now, that AI does not do a good job with.”
He also described how teachers can use AI tools to come up with a multitude of questions or problem sets quicker than they could manually.
“I’ll go back to my time as a chemistry teacher,” Chan said. “I used to struggle with coming up with different problems I wanted to create for an assignment that could reach different levels of student learning.”
It could also help teachers generate faster feedback or grading on assignments than their manual grading, doing work in seconds that might take teachers a week or two. Of course, Chan explained, teachers should look over that feedback and override it when necessary.
AI tools can be useful, but have their limitations. Chan previously looked into plagiarism-checking programs, designed with teachers in mind, that boasted up to 90% accuracy.
He saw, though, that these numbers soon dropped. One of the most popular tools by an ETHS educational technology vendor ended up shutting down entirely, as it couldn’t maintain the level of accuracy it said it could at its launch.
AI and plagiarism
Chan described how educators, including himself, were initially concerned that students would go directly to AI tools for school assignments once they became available.
“We’ve had some cases of that, but it has not been a huge influx, to my knowledge,” Chan said. “What that tells me is that there is this understanding of appropriate and not, and I think we need to continue teaching that and reinforcing it.”
Teachers have to keep an eye out for plenty of other forms of plagiarism that any technology might not be able to catch, too. Students might try to pass off the work of parents or tutors as their own.
There are plenty of options for avoiding this kind of behavior, from going back to only handwritten assignments to teachers trying to learn students’ voices early on so they can catch when it seems different.
Chan, though, explained that with AI technology available, it’s an opportunity for teachers to take a look at what kinds of questions they’re asking and what they want students to show in their answers.
In a workshop he gave before the 2023-2024 school year, Chan encouraged educators to drop some of their assignment prompts into AI tools and see what the service came up with.
Assigning to bypass AI
This encouraged the teachers to ask questions about their own assignments, like how could they redefine or recreate them to accomplish learning goals that can’t be directly answered by ChatGPT.
He’s also seen gray areas of AI usage, where students have come to teachers saying they’ve used the tool for small items, like making an essay title better. They want to know how to cite this usage, or if it’s allowed.
“That’s something we’re all navigating, not just our students, but the world,” Chan said.
From an equity standpoint, the school also understands that students have varying access to devices outside of the classroom. Blocking AI tools on school devices might only limit access for students without other devices.
“I’ve seen some ed-tech fads come and go, but this one, I believe, is not one of those,” Chan said. “It’s worth the investment of time and conversation and thought to make sure we work with our students on this.”
How ETHS tackles the puzzle of AI in the classroom is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.