philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Post-apocalyptic education

What comes after the Homework Apocalypse

... As of eight months ago, a representative survey in the US found that 82% of undergraduates and 72% of K12 students had used AI for school. ...

[Cheating on homework] is not a new problem. One of the first uses of any new technology has always been to get help with homework. A study of thousands of students at Rutgers found that when they did their homework in 2008, it improved test grades for 86% of them (see, homework really does help!), but homework only helped 45% of students in 2017. Why? The rise of the Internet. By 2017, a majority of students were copying internet answers, rather than doing the work themselves. ...

The Homework Apocalypse has already happened and may even have happened before generative AI! Why are more people not seeing this as an emergency? I think it has to do with two illusions. ...

Detection Illusion: teachers believe they can still easily detect AI use, and therefore can prevent it from being used in schoolwork. ...

While teachers grapple with the Detection Illusion, students face their own misconception: Illusory Knowledge. They don’t actually realize that getting help with homework is undermining their learning. ... As the authors of the study at Rutgers wrote: “There is no reason to believe that the students are aware that their homework strategy lowers their exam score... they make the commonsense inference that any study strategy that raises their homework quiz score raises their exam score as well.” ...

We know that almost three-quarters of teachers are already using AI for work, but we have just started to learn the most effective ways for teachers to use AI. ...

See the full article here: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/post-apocalyptic-education