{"id":173812,"date":"2026-04-23T12:51:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T12:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/173812\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T12:51:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T12:51:10","slug":"penn-state-berks-to-host-ai-focused-assessment-workshop-for-k-12-educators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/173812\/","title":{"rendered":"Penn State Berks to host AI-focused assessment workshop for K-12 educators"},"content":{"rendered":"

WYOMISSING, Pa. \u2014 Penn State Berks will host a workshop titled \u201cDesigning critical thinking assessments in the Age of AI: Prompt and context engineering workshop\u201d on Tuesday, May 12, from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Gaige Technology and Business Innovation Building, room 244. The workshop is designed for K-12 educators. Participants who complete the full event will receive five hours of ACT 48 credit. The event is free, and breakfast and lunch will be provided. Registration is required by 5 p.m. on April 30.<\/a><\/p>\n

The workshop is supported by the Presidential AI Challenge through Community-based Partnerships (DCL NSF 25-036) under the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded project, \u201cEnhancing Critical Thinking in Introductory Programming through Artificial Intelligence and Socratic Metacognitive Inquiry-based Learning Environment (SMILE),\u201d Grant No. 2518611.<\/p>\n

The \u201cSMILE\u201d workshop is designed to help K-12 educators use artificial intelligence effectively and responsibly in their teaching. It will introduce practical prompt-engineering strategies that help educators use large language models as reliable teaching assistants for generating lessons, scaffolded materials and consistent feedback. The workshop also will guide K-12 educators in designing AI-enhanced assessments that strengthen students\u2019 critical-thinking skills through Socratic questioning, reasoning-focused tasks and structured thinking stages.<\/p>\n

Workshop agenda<\/p>\n

8:30\u20139 a.m. \u2014 Breakfast and introduction to SMILE<\/p>\n

9:30\u201311:30 a.m. \u2014 Morning session: Prompt engineering to turn the LLM into a reliable teaching assistant<\/p>\n

Participants will learn how to use simple templates to get clear, classroom-ready outputs on the first try; apply \u201cverify and refine\u201d prompts to reduce AI mistakes; generate lesson ideas, examples and checks for understanding efficiently; create scaffolded and on-level options without rewriting materials; keep activities aligned with learning objectives and required skills; produce consistent criteria and student-friendly feedback language; and add privacy and bias guardrails to support safe, inclusive materials.<\/p>\n

11:30 a.m.\u2013noon \u2014 Networking lunch<\/p>\n

Noon\u20132 p.m. \u2014 Afternoon session: Designing assessments and exercises that build critical thinking in the age of AI<\/p>\n

This session will explore how to use Socratic questioning as a practical framework for scaffolding and evaluating critical thinking through the SMILE framework; move from answer-focused tasks to reasoning-focused assessments; design custom GPTs that guide students to clarify, analyze, justify and reflect; and use structured thinking stages to make student reasoning more visible and assessable.<\/p>\n

Space is limited, and so final participants will be selected from the applicant pool through a fair process that aims to achieve balanced representation across school districts, institutions and subject domains in alignment with NSF guidelines.<\/p>\n

For more information, visit the website<\/a> or contact Abdullah Konak<\/a>, distinguished professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State Berks, at AUK3@psu.edu<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WYOMISSING, Pa. \u2014 Penn State Berks will host a workshop titled \u201cDesigning critical thinking assessments in the Age…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19767,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[128,130,129],"class_list":{"0":"post-173812","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-reading","8":"tag-reading-city","9":"tag-reading-city-headlines","10":"tag-reading-city-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}