AI in education: An opportunity to do away with homework altogether
Kids to go school 6-8 hours per day from primary school onwards. That should give the school enough time to educate the kids without needing them to do much, if any, homework.
Now that AI has almost fully defeated the limited point of homework, and TikTok has zapped attention spans and turns everything into a 6 second video, getting rid of homework completely and educating kids in an environment where smartphones and AI are not available seems worth exploring.
AI and education
After the dust settled on Apple’s research claiming AIs are not intelligent, the AI discourse is now buzzing with takes on this study titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT”. It studied a small group of college students tasked to write an essay, and showed that those who were allowed to use ChatGPT freely, remembered less about their essays and did worse when later asked to write their essays again. The study also showed a lower level of brain activity in the students using ChatGPT. The more dramatic interpretations of this have captured the imagination and opened doors to massive online shit-posting and rage-baiting (🫨 BrAiN dAmAgE!1!).
A more nuanced reading is that this is an interesting result, and it makes sense to look at whether this is an early canary dropping dead in the coal mine situation1. So to that end I rounded up a short list of potentially dead canaries to try and get a qualitative idea of the situation on the ground:
The r/Teachers subreddit has many posts like this basically denouncing ChatGPT as frying their students willingness and ability to do anything themselves. I like this source because these are actual practitioners on the front-line sharing their experiences.
Another small study in Turkish High School students that also showed that unguided usage of ChatGPT to complete assignments harms learning. Students end up just letting AI give them the answer.
On the other hand, there are also credible trials showing very positive results from bringing AI into classrooms:
For example, a randomized, controlled World Bank study finds using a GPT-4 tutor with teacher guidance in a six week after school program in Nigeria had "more than twice the effect of some of the most effective interventions in education" at very low costs.
….
A Harvard experiment in a large physics class found a well-prompted AI tutor outperformed active classes in learning outcomes; a study done in a massive programming class at Stanford found use of ChatGPT led to increased exam grades; a Malaysian study found AI used in conjunction with teacher guidance and solid pedagogy led to more learning;
All from this post by Ethan Mollick
The predictable key takeaway is (as always): It depends!
But between these datapoints coupled with some experience having been a teenager long ago, I feel there are enough dead canaries here to draw some early conclusions:
Students are using AI en-masse to do their homework for them.
There is no way to stop this; give them a school sanctioned AI that functions more like a tutor, and they will anyway just fire up ChatGPT and get it to give them the answers.
This removes the need for them to actually learn the subject matter, harming both their test results and the degree to which they ‘learn to learn’.
The case against homework in primary and high school
When I was in Group 8 (the last year of Dutch primary school. Kids turn 12 that year), we had to do the CITO Toets. That is the big exam that determines to which Middle School (Dutch secondary education that combines middle and high school) you can get access to. It happened in April or May (I think), well before the summer holidays. In my mind, after the test was over, Primary School was done. The remaining month and half until the summer holidays would be spent chilling, playing, reading, maybe learning some new stuff in class. But my teacher had a different idea.
Under the guise of “getting used to the homework load in middle school”, he gave us a sheet of homework every day. It would take one to two hours to finish. It was pointless. What do you mean “getting used to the homework load?” We will cross that bridge when we get there, thank you very much.
At first, I used a calculator to do the long-tail divisions faster, making up random numbers for the intermediate steps. My teacher was not happy, but what could he do. As I realized more and more that he could, in fact, do nothing about it, I stopped using a calculator and just roughly estimated the answers. That was still a fun game for a while, to see how close I could get. But soon, I got bored of that and started just putting down completely random numbers. The teacher told my parents that with my lazy attitude I would surely fail in middle school and in life. My parents mentioned it to me, we laughed. Life went on.
This was, I later realized, the first breaking point in my respect for my teachers and their attempts to get me to play by their pedantic rules. Throughout middle school I did the absolute minimum amount of work to pass. I often racked up fails in the first half of the year, knowing I could offset them by studying a bit and getting a couple of 8s and 9s (As) near the end of each year. So, this is where I’m coming from. I have deep empathy for students hacking their results by using ChatGPT. I would have done the same, and believe me: I would effortlessly prompt and hack my way around any attempts by teachers to prevent it.
But my juvenile hatred of work for work’s sake aside, with time I’ve come to the belief that the whole idea of making young people do additional school work after hours is misguided. What does it teach them? What does it prepare them for? Most jobs are not like that, and if they are, they usually pay well. There is a certain level of righteousness and sadism, it seems. The idea that kids need to proof that they can work hard, and obey their elders in taking on discomfort, just because they tell them to.
Well, thankfully my parents agreed with me (or maybe causality runs the other direction). I did barely any homework until I went to university at age 18. What did I do with all the free time, you might ask? I played computer games, which taught me all my early computer skills. I made music with keyboards and computers. I did tons of sport. I read a lot of books. Those activities all pay more dividends today than being slightly better at French would have.
So when it comes to choosing a primary school for our kids, the absence of home work and emphasis on academic performance is something I’ll be on the lookout for. I think more schools and people should try that. And a no-homework protocol could maybe even be extended to middle- and high school.
How might we educate kids within the 30 hours they spend in school each week?
There are some legitimate obstacles. Teacher shortages are one. When I was in high school I had quite a lot of slack in my schedule. Most days started at 10:30 (awesome mornings watching MTV by myself at home). If this can be solved in some way (perhaps in part with AI?), can we make the time spent in school a bit more effective for students? Ahead of a test, create dedicated time to study?
If an essay needs to be written, or math needs to be practiced, let’s try doing that in a room, with pen and paper, with all the smartphones in a vault. The point should be to learn how to think, learn hard skills like writing and math, and learn the basics of a bunch of other subjects. Practice makes perfect, sure, but how does huge amounts of homework contribute to any of these goals?
A key argument is that there might be value in students learning to work independently and manage their time outside structured environments. To some degree, students understand this too. Is copious homework needed for students to learn this? Or will they learn this by themselves as they work their way through college, or through other personal projects? Maybe there is data about this?
But I do think the main obstacle, even to the idea of doing all work in school, are probably going to be the students themselves.
The hard one: how do you convince students of this?
The justifications given for pretty much anything by teachers are always relentlessly ridiculed by the students. And often times rightfully so.
When we had a course about computer use, we had figured out within two classes how to install Mortal Kombat 2 on the school computers and started playing games. The computer teacher had no idea how we did it, or even how to remove it. A bunch of 13 year olds for whom there was nothing practical a teacher could tell them about computers. We even had Super Mario on our calculators. We might have benefitted from entry-level programming though, or building electrical circuits. Would I have enjoyed that? I think so. But it’s hard to put myself really into my 13 year old mind.
There was clearly enough time, though. In high school there were dedicated hours scheduled for individual work time. None of us used them to do any work. We all just had fun with our friends. Every now and then a teacher would come in and tell us to shut up and work. Then we would read one of our textbooks for a bit until the coast was clear again. How could we have been made to take that time more seriously?
I don’t know the answer to this question. But I do believe it is possible. And also that trying to figure this out is preferable over a situation where homework is still assigned, and then just done with AI with TikTok open on another screen.
Always fun to share an exhaustive definition of a well-known concept just in case someone reading did not know the historical context: A "dead canary in a coal mine" is an idiom that refers to an early warning sign of danger. Historically, canaries were used in coal mines because they are more sensitive to toxic gases like carbon monoxide than humans. If a canary died in the mine, it signaled to the miners that dangerous gases were present, prompting them to evacuate. The phrase is now used more broadly to describe any indicator that suggests a potentially harmful situation.