High-Stakes Testing & AI: Be careful of what you wish for? Upfront, know that I reject the notion that standardized testing should drive learning.
The Impact of High-stakes Testing on the Learning Environment
“ Kids today are literally spending half of their school year on learning how to take a high-stakes test, testing is adding up to about 5 months of their schooling. In elementary school, we are teaching our students how to take a test through tutorials, then setting up practice labs, and then practicing the actual test, and then we add in staff meetings and staff tutorials, it is overtaking our schools. Day in and day out testing is at the forefront of learning, and it is consuming are teacher’s daily curriculum. The pressure is high when being put in a position of being sanctioned or rewarded so it is difficult to spend less time teaching the material that will be on an achievement test.” ~ Maddolyn Ritt (2016 The Impact of High-stakes Testing on the Learning Environment > https://sophia.stkate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1660&context=msw_papers <
Should anyone be surprised that 2 decades of high-stakes testing reducing learning to multiple choice and brief correct responses have made it easy for AI to build essays using these kinds of responses? Never mind how such learning reduces how teachers and students interact with each other. AI is the perfect essay for questions built on those 5-months of endless test prep from grades 3 to 12. Testing companies/CEOs wished for ways to profit, and policymakers and legislators gave it to them. Perhaps our learning motto should be American Children are Test Scores and Profits?
Negative Effects of AI in Education EDU Passport
“To begin with, AI may reduce the opportunities for students and educators to interact and socialize with each other. These interactions are important for developing skills such as emotional intelligence, empathy, communication, and collaboration. AI cannot fully substitute the human connection and the emotional support that educators and students provide to each other in the classroom.” > https://blog.edupassport.io/2023/07/negative-effects-of-ai-in-education-sector/#:~:text=To%20begin%20with%2C%20AI%20may,empathy%2C%20communication%2C%20and%20collaboration. <
Rather than discussing ways to enhance our human connections? Rather than discuss how AI may reduce how students and teachers interact and socialize, we are worried about AI writing essays for our students. Essays that over the past 2 decades have been watered down to factual short learning responses void of our personal, social, emotional, and cultural realities. Essay made to order for AI.
My students no longer question what they are learning, they really question why or what I ask of them. However, they always ask for the rubric, count the points, and chase points not learning. They play a game of filling boxes, not their minds.
I have learned to ask those bigger questions about why and what we learn, asking learners to discuss, question, and respond not only with simplified facts, but to elaborate on how what they learn impacts them personally, socially, emotionally, politically, and culturally. Are there hidden agendas in what Dr. Turner is asking you to learn? My best defense against AI, is to engage my students in discussions about bigger reasons for learning.
I am not afraid of the Big Bad AI, Dr. Jesse P. Turner
CCSU Literacy Center Director
A short video blog on the above.
Just in case you like to listen to the tune that inspired my morning walk it is Peter Seeger singing the cover of "Little Boxes" by
Malvina Reynolds > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUwUp-D_VV0 <
