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A visitor walks by an exhibition about AI in education\u00a0during the the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai China, July 4, 2024. Contributing columnist Abby McCloskey writes that AI seems to be working against educational objectives, and urges Dallas ISD to restrict it.<\/p>\n
Andy Wong\/AP<\/p>\n
Dallas-Fort Worth is projected to become the third-largest U.S. metro area sometime in the next decade, surpassing Chicago. It\u2019s time we started acting like it, starting with our schools.\u00a0<\/p>\n
School districts in the largest cities in the nation \u2014 Los Angeles and New York City \u2014 have taken dramatic steps to curb AI use in the classroom this school year. The former has banned it for all grades; the latter until middle school. The Big Apple has gone so far as to ban screens entirely until third grade. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Here at home, my son took home a school-sponsored iPad starting in kindergarten. At least mandatory masking was only during school hours. When it comes to screens, we\u2019re playing it loosey-goosey down here. A bit too much, in this mom of three\u2019s opinion. \u00a0<\/p>\n
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Official AI guidance<\/a> for pre-K to fifth grades students from Dallas ISD reads: \u201csit with your child while they use AI. Treat it like reading a book together.\u201d \u00a0You read that right, Winnie the Pooh and Richard Scarry. ChatGPT is the new family-friendly bedtime story.<\/p>\n DISD guidance continues, laddering up to equity and the promise to use AI to enhance learning, not replace it. The problem is that learning loss with AI seems to be unavoidable.\u00a0<\/p>\n There are the cheating and plagiarism issues. A new survey by Common Sense Media\u2019s Youth AI Safety Institute found that 63% of teens are using AI<\/a> to get homework answers. But many schools seem to be getting rid of homework anyway, and testing could return to pens and blue books.<\/p>\n The real problem is what the researchers call \u201ccognitive offloading,\u201d and children with developing brains asking AI for information on the regular that they used to have to critically think about. In a journal article titled \u201cYour Brain on ChatGPT,\u201d MIT researchers found<\/a> that subjects using ChatGPT to write had 55% less brain activity and weaker neural connectivity than those who wrote without it. The vast majority (83%) were also unable to remember parts of the essays they had just written.<\/p>\n Another recent study, this time out of the University of Hong Kong and Stockholm University, looked at 27,000 students ages 12 to 18. After six months of using AI, students scored 20% lower on exams<\/a> than their classmates who had not utilized AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n This couldn\u2019t be coming at a worse time for American students. Forget the coastal elites as our primary competition. The latest Program for International Student Assessment scores show American kids are the equivalent of seven years behind Chinese students<\/a> in math and our reading scores are near 25-year lows<\/a>. \u00a0<\/p>\n The PISA assessment also found that nearly half of kids use AI for educational purposes, and it\u2019s not helping. Students who didn\u2019t use AI for drafting text scored 28 points higher, on average, than those who said they use it almost every day. That gap is equivalent to about 1.5 school years.\u00a0<\/p>\n This should trigger some soul searching and, more importantly, action. To be sure, the drop in student scores is influenced by many factors. But we can start rebuilding by ensuring kids read, write and do math with their own brains.\u00a0<\/p>\n No one else will do it for us. We cannot rely on Big Tech to exercise caution for students on our (or educator\u2019s) behalf. ChatGPT Teen is their latest offering in this regard, promising to prompt students to keep thinking through answers to homework questions instead of answering for them.\u00a0<\/p>\n