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"content": "\u003cp>Stacks of worksheets sit atop desks and tables in Chanea Bond’s Fort Worth classroom. Her students all have their own school-issued laptops, but Bond has swapped computers for paper — lots of paper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each class begins with several minutes of journaling in notebooks, and nearly all assignments must be handwritten and physically turned in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you walk into almost any one of my classes today, you will see that all of my students are handwriting,” Bond says, “and they are journaling, and they are constantly and consistently doing everything with a pen or a pencil.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bond teaches at Southwest High School in the Fort Worth Independent School District, which serves mostly students from low-income backgrounds. She says going almost entirely analog is the best way she’s found to keep generative artificial intelligence out of her American literature and composition classes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“A lot of people say to me: ‘Aren’t you afraid that they’re going to get behind?’ And my response is: ‘I know that when my students leave my class that they know how to think and they know how to write.'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recent data suggests educators may be embracing AI more than they’re eschewing it, like Bond has. Roughly 60% of surveyed teachers said they used AI at least a little in their classroom, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/technology/chatgpt-for-teachers-a-boon-a-bust-or-just-meh/2025/11?utm_source=chatgpt.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">July 2025\u003c/a> poll from the EdWeek Research Center.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Initially, Bond says she tried to incorporate AI into her teaching. She had students read and annotate the poem \u003cem>Still I Rise\u003c/em> by Maya Angelou, and then she allowed them to use AI to write a thesis statement for a literary analysis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was terrible,” she says, adding that it was clear the students who used AI weren’t really engaging with the text.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They didn’t know the material because they had outsourced that level of thinking and they didn’t have to come to a conclusion or an argument about the text they were studying on their own.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She realized her students couldn’t always discern whether what AI generated was valuable or not, and they still needed to build foundational skills, like how to write a thesis and construct an argument.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Where are those skills going to be built, if not here?” Bond asks.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What AI-free teaching looks like\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Bond says journaling by hand at the start of every class gets her students in the practice of writing and builds their confidence to write longer pieces. It also allows Bond to learn their writing voices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I know that I have a lot of students who don’t believe that their voices sound academic enough,” Bond says. “I like to give them low stakes opportunities to start cultivating what they want to say and how they want to say it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/1600x1066+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fcd%2F11%2F2e2ab82e478d9171130deeaf2c0a%2Fai-ban3.jpg\" alt=\"Bond provides her students with dictionaries, so they don't have to rely on technology to look up words. And she sometimes uses a pocket instructor book for ideas to get students to talk about and engage with literature.\">\u003cfigcaption>Bond provides her students with dictionaries, so they don’t have to rely on technology to look up words. And she sometimes uses a pocket instructor book for ideas to get students to talk about and engage with literature. \u003ccite> (Nitashia Johnson for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>And instead of grading only the final essay or presentation, Bond grades the different parts of the process, including the thesis, the outline, the bibliography and the handwritten draft.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The steps matter to the cumulative overall grade because that’s how I know that the thinking is happening,” Bond says. “I think a student is less likely to turn in something that is written by AI if they’ve had to show me the beginning, the middle and the end, and the different pieces that go into it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When students reach the final stages of this process, Bond has them type their essays out. Unless they have accommodations for a disability, Bond says this is the only time students use computers in her class.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The response from students\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Meyah Alvarez, a junior, was initially confused by Bond’s approach. She says at the beginning of the school year, she turned in a typed outline for a poetry analysis podcast and Bond told her to re-do it by hand because it would help her think and write better.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was different, but I do like it now,” Alvarez says. “I feel like it actually does get my brain thinking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Literature classes haven’t always been Alvarez’s favorite, but she says she loves Bond’s lessons. She likes the interactive nature of her assignments and that Bond gives students opportunities to write about their opinions and experiences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ms. Bond’s approach is very good. Like, she makes it to where AI can’t even really help you at this point,” Alvarez says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/1600x1066+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F83%2Ff5%2Fbb18d15643908e6204ed3fb97679%2Fai-ban4.jpg\" alt=\"Bond's classroom includes a display of handwritten thank you notes from students.\">\u003cfigcaption>Bond’s classroom includes a display of handwritten thank you notes from students. \u003ccite> (Nitashia Johnson for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Several of Bond’s students told NPR they appreciate Bond’s AI ban because they’re opposed to the technology for \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/10/14/nx-s1-5565147/google-ai-data-centers-growth-environment-electricity\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">environmental\u003c/a> and ethical reasons. But virtually all of them say AI-use on school assignments is widespread among their peers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Maybe some of us don’t want to admit that we use it because it’s kind of a cultural taboo,” says sophomore Eligh Ellison.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ellison says he’s used AI to help him with schoolwork in the past, and to brainstorm names for characters in stories he writes. But he supports Bond’s AI ban. He says her class is an opportunity to figure out what \u003cem>he \u003c/em>thinks — not what AI thinks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think that AI does have a time and a place, but especially as it’s still evolving and a lot of us are still yet to make solid opinions, we’re standing on shaky ground.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even students who have gotten caught using AI in Bond’s class say they’ve learned from the experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>T, a junior, says he turned to AI after waiting until the last minute to complete a bibliography on his chosen research topic: the adultification of children. His family requested we only use his first initial so he can talk freely without it impacting college applications.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It probably wasn’t smart, but also I had other work to do. So I put it through AI. I had it write it for me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bond says she realized immediately that T had used AI. She was disappointed, but she tried not to take it personally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He really felt overwhelmed and he got to a point where he felt really afraid of not turning something in, and so he turned something in,” Bond says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>T redid the assignment from scratch with help from Bond.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says he now has this advice for students who may be tempted to use AI to do their schoolwork for them: “Take a second and think about it. Would you rather really grow from an experience of actually doing some work and critically thinking about the things you’re writing or talking about, or just taking nothing away from it and just use a robot?”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How others are embracing the technology\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Not every teacher agrees with Bond’s approach – including her friend, Brett Vogelsinger, who teaches English at Central Bucks High School South outside Philadelphia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says he tries to model responsible AI use to his students, showing them the difference between using the technology to cheat and using it to advance their learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vogelsinger says he wants his students to be able “to determine that this particular use is shortcutting and shortchanging my thinking and this use is pushing me and actually making me think more.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And he allows AI use on some assignments — so long as students are transparent about \u003cem>how\u003c/em> they used it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But even Vogelsinger, who wrote a book about using AI in writing instruction, says he’s still figuring out how and when to incorporate AI into teaching: “We’re very much in the experimental phase of all this.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>And while Bond and many of her students see the value of an AI-free classroom, the federal government, some states and some school districts are embracing the technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Miami-Dade County Public Schools, one of the country’s largest districts, \u003ca href=\"https://www.wlrn.org/education/2025-05-19/miami-schools-ai\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">gives high schoolers access to Google’s Gemini chatbot\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The future is now,” said Miami-Dade Superintendent Jose Dotres, \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz8GI5piLT4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in a video\u003c/a> published on the Google for Education YouTube account. “We have to embrace the fact that AI is becoming an important tool for not only learning, but teaching.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>New Jersey set aside \u003ca href=\"https://www.nj.gov/education/news/2025/NewJerseyDepartmentofEducationAnnouncesGrantAwardstoSupportArtificialIntelligenceInnovationinEducation.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">over a million dollars in grants\u003c/a> last year to advance classroom AI use. The governor at the time, Phil Murphy, said it was an effort to invest in “the next generation of tech leaders.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And last spring, the Trump administration issued an executive order to expand AI education in K-12 schools through public-private partnerships and grants for AI teacher training. Guidance from the U.S. Department of Education also supports “responsible adoption of AI” in schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/1600x1066+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F8e%2F1b%2F375713144fa09bb8195ad5c1ff92%2Fai-ban5.jpg\" alt=\"Chanea Bond disagrees with the argument that not incorporating AI into lessons puts her students at risk of falling behind. 'I just don't see a world where students learning how to think and learning how to articulate themselves puts them at a disadvantage,' she says.\">\u003cfigcaption>Chanea Bond disagrees with the argument that not incorporating AI into lessons puts her students at risk of falling behind. “I just don’t see a world where students learning how to think and learning how to articulate themselves puts them at a disadvantage,” she says. \u003ccite> (Nitashia Johnson for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Bond says she’s open to changing her mind, but right now she doesn’t see much value in AI for her students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s less harmful to me to make sure that they can do the things without the AI than to try and push the AI into my classroom knowing that, at least for some of them, it’s going to mean that they don’t get to acquire the skills that they need,” Bond says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This reporting was supported by a grant from the\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tarbellcenter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem> Tarbell Center for AI Journalism\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and the Omidyar Network’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://omidyar.com/update/omidyar-network-announces-2026-class-of-reporters-in-residence/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Reporters in Residence program\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Forth Worth teacher Chanea Bond says sticking with pen and paper keeps generative artificial intelligence out of her American literature classes.",
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"title": "‘It Was Terrible’: AI Failures Make Writing by Hand Better for Thinking Skills in One Classroom | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Stacks of worksheets sit atop desks and tables in Chanea Bond’s Fort Worth classroom. Her students all have their own school-issued laptops, but Bond has swapped computers for paper — lots of paper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each class begins with several minutes of journaling in notebooks, and nearly all assignments must be handwritten and physically turned in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you walk into almost any one of my classes today, you will see that all of my students are handwriting,” Bond says, “and they are journaling, and they are constantly and consistently doing everything with a pen or a pencil.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bond teaches at Southwest High School in the Fort Worth Independent School District, which serves mostly students from low-income backgrounds. She says going almost entirely analog is the best way she’s found to keep generative artificial intelligence out of her American literature and composition classes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“A lot of people say to me: ‘Aren’t you afraid that they’re going to get behind?’ And my response is: ‘I know that when my students leave my class that they know how to think and they know how to write.'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recent data suggests educators may be embracing AI more than they’re eschewing it, like Bond has. Roughly 60% of surveyed teachers said they used AI at least a little in their classroom, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/technology/chatgpt-for-teachers-a-boon-a-bust-or-just-meh/2025/11?utm_source=chatgpt.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">July 2025\u003c/a> poll from the EdWeek Research Center.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Initially, Bond says she tried to incorporate AI into her teaching. She had students read and annotate the poem \u003cem>Still I Rise\u003c/em> by Maya Angelou, and then she allowed them to use AI to write a thesis statement for a literary analysis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was terrible,” she says, adding that it was clear the students who used AI weren’t really engaging with the text.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They didn’t know the material because they had outsourced that level of thinking and they didn’t have to come to a conclusion or an argument about the text they were studying on their own.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She realized her students couldn’t always discern whether what AI generated was valuable or not, and they still needed to build foundational skills, like how to write a thesis and construct an argument.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Where are those skills going to be built, if not here?” Bond asks.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What AI-free teaching looks like\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Bond says journaling by hand at the start of every class gets her students in the practice of writing and builds their confidence to write longer pieces. It also allows Bond to learn their writing voices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I know that I have a lot of students who don’t believe that their voices sound academic enough,” Bond says. “I like to give them low stakes opportunities to start cultivating what they want to say and how they want to say it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/1600x1066+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fcd%2F11%2F2e2ab82e478d9171130deeaf2c0a%2Fai-ban3.jpg\" alt=\"Bond provides her students with dictionaries, so they don't have to rely on technology to look up words. And she sometimes uses a pocket instructor book for ideas to get students to talk about and engage with literature.\">\u003cfigcaption>Bond provides her students with dictionaries, so they don’t have to rely on technology to look up words. And she sometimes uses a pocket instructor book for ideas to get students to talk about and engage with literature. \u003ccite> (Nitashia Johnson for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>And instead of grading only the final essay or presentation, Bond grades the different parts of the process, including the thesis, the outline, the bibliography and the handwritten draft.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The steps matter to the cumulative overall grade because that’s how I know that the thinking is happening,” Bond says. “I think a student is less likely to turn in something that is written by AI if they’ve had to show me the beginning, the middle and the end, and the different pieces that go into it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When students reach the final stages of this process, Bond has them type their essays out. Unless they have accommodations for a disability, Bond says this is the only time students use computers in her class.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The response from students\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Meyah Alvarez, a junior, was initially confused by Bond’s approach. She says at the beginning of the school year, she turned in a typed outline for a poetry analysis podcast and Bond told her to re-do it by hand because it would help her think and write better.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was different, but I do like it now,” Alvarez says. “I feel like it actually does get my brain thinking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Literature classes haven’t always been Alvarez’s favorite, but she says she loves Bond’s lessons. She likes the interactive nature of her assignments and that Bond gives students opportunities to write about their opinions and experiences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ms. Bond’s approach is very good. Like, she makes it to where AI can’t even really help you at this point,” Alvarez says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/1600x1066+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F83%2Ff5%2Fbb18d15643908e6204ed3fb97679%2Fai-ban4.jpg\" alt=\"Bond's classroom includes a display of handwritten thank you notes from students.\">\u003cfigcaption>Bond’s classroom includes a display of handwritten thank you notes from students. \u003ccite> (Nitashia Johnson for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Several of Bond’s students told NPR they appreciate Bond’s AI ban because they’re opposed to the technology for \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/10/14/nx-s1-5565147/google-ai-data-centers-growth-environment-electricity\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">environmental\u003c/a> and ethical reasons. But virtually all of them say AI-use on school assignments is widespread among their peers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Maybe some of us don’t want to admit that we use it because it’s kind of a cultural taboo,” says sophomore Eligh Ellison.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ellison says he’s used AI to help him with schoolwork in the past, and to brainstorm names for characters in stories he writes. But he supports Bond’s AI ban. He says her class is an opportunity to figure out what \u003cem>he \u003c/em>thinks — not what AI thinks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think that AI does have a time and a place, but especially as it’s still evolving and a lot of us are still yet to make solid opinions, we’re standing on shaky ground.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even students who have gotten caught using AI in Bond’s class say they’ve learned from the experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>T, a junior, says he turned to AI after waiting until the last minute to complete a bibliography on his chosen research topic: the adultification of children. His family requested we only use his first initial so he can talk freely without it impacting college applications.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It probably wasn’t smart, but also I had other work to do. So I put it through AI. I had it write it for me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bond says she realized immediately that T had used AI. She was disappointed, but she tried not to take it personally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He really felt overwhelmed and he got to a point where he felt really afraid of not turning something in, and so he turned something in,” Bond says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>T redid the assignment from scratch with help from Bond.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says he now has this advice for students who may be tempted to use AI to do their schoolwork for them: “Take a second and think about it. Would you rather really grow from an experience of actually doing some work and critically thinking about the things you’re writing or talking about, or just taking nothing away from it and just use a robot?”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How others are embracing the technology\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Not every teacher agrees with Bond’s approach – including her friend, Brett Vogelsinger, who teaches English at Central Bucks High School South outside Philadelphia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says he tries to model responsible AI use to his students, showing them the difference between using the technology to cheat and using it to advance their learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vogelsinger says he wants his students to be able “to determine that this particular use is shortcutting and shortchanging my thinking and this use is pushing me and actually making me think more.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And he allows AI use on some assignments — so long as students are transparent about \u003cem>how\u003c/em> they used it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But even Vogelsinger, who wrote a book about using AI in writing instruction, says he’s still figuring out how and when to incorporate AI into teaching: “We’re very much in the experimental phase of all this.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>And while Bond and many of her students see the value of an AI-free classroom, the federal government, some states and some school districts are embracing the technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Miami-Dade County Public Schools, one of the country’s largest districts, \u003ca href=\"https://www.wlrn.org/education/2025-05-19/miami-schools-ai\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">gives high schoolers access to Google’s Gemini chatbot\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The future is now,” said Miami-Dade Superintendent Jose Dotres, \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz8GI5piLT4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in a video\u003c/a> published on the Google for Education YouTube account. “We have to embrace the fact that AI is becoming an important tool for not only learning, but teaching.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>New Jersey set aside \u003ca href=\"https://www.nj.gov/education/news/2025/NewJerseyDepartmentofEducationAnnouncesGrantAwardstoSupportArtificialIntelligenceInnovationinEducation.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">over a million dollars in grants\u003c/a> last year to advance classroom AI use. The governor at the time, Phil Murphy, said it was an effort to invest in “the next generation of tech leaders.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And last spring, the Trump administration issued an executive order to expand AI education in K-12 schools through public-private partnerships and grants for AI teacher training. Guidance from the U.S. Department of Education also supports “responsible adoption of AI” in schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/1600x1066+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F8e%2F1b%2F375713144fa09bb8195ad5c1ff92%2Fai-ban5.jpg\" alt=\"Chanea Bond disagrees with the argument that not incorporating AI into lessons puts her students at risk of falling behind. 'I just don't see a world where students learning how to think and learning how to articulate themselves puts them at a disadvantage,' she says.\">\u003cfigcaption>Chanea Bond disagrees with the argument that not incorporating AI into lessons puts her students at risk of falling behind. “I just don’t see a world where students learning how to think and learning how to articulate themselves puts them at a disadvantage,” she says. \u003ccite> (Nitashia Johnson for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Bond says she’s open to changing her mind, but right now she doesn’t see much value in AI for her students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s less harmful to me to make sure that they can do the things without the AI than to try and push the AI into my classroom knowing that, at least for some of them, it’s going to mean that they don’t get to acquire the skills that they need,” Bond says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The risks of using \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/65296/with-ai-changing-everything-heres-how-teachers-can-shape-the-new-culture-of-learning\">generative artificial intelligence\u003c/a> to educate children and teens currently overshadow the benefits, according to a new study by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sweeping study includes focus groups and interviews with K-12 students, parents, educators and tech experts in 50 countries, as well as a literature review of hundreds of research articles. It found that using AI in education can “undermine children’s foundational development” and that “the damages it has already caused are daunting,” though “fixable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Because generative AI is still young — ChatGPT was released \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">just over three years ago\u003c/a> — the report’s authors dubbed their review a “premortem” intended to study AI’s potential in the classroom without a postmortem’s benefits of time, long-term data or hindsight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are some of the pros and cons that the report lays out, along with a sampling of the study’s recommendations for teachers, parents, school leaders and government officials:\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pro: AI can help students learn to read and write\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Teachers surveyed for the report said AI can be useful when it comes to language acquisition, especially for students learning a second language. For example, AI can adjust the complexity of a passage depending on the reader’s skill, and it offers privacy for students who struggle in large-group settings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers reported that AI can also help improve students’ writing, so long as it is used to support students’ efforts and not to do the work for them: “Teachers report that AI can ‘spark creativity’ and help students overcome writer’s block. … At the drafting stage, it can help with organization, coherence, syntax, semantics, and grammar. At the revision stage, AI can support the editing and rewriting of ideas as well as help with … punctuation, capitalization, and grammar.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, if there is a refrain in the report, it is this: AI is most useful when it’s supplementing, not replacing, the efforts of a flesh-and-blood teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Con: AI poses a grave threat to students’ cognitive development\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>At the top of Brookings’ list of risks is the negative effect AI can have on children’s cognitive growth — how they learn new skills and perceive and solve problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report describes a kind of doom loop of AI dependence, where students increasingly off-load their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rebecca Winthrop, one of the report’s authors and a senior fellow at Brookings, warns, “When kids use generative AI that tells them what the answer is … they are not thinking for themselves. They’re not learning to parse truth from fiction. They’re not learning to understand what makes a good argument. They’re not learning about different perspectives in the world because they’re actually not engaging in the material.\u003cem>“\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cognitive off-loading isn’t new. The report points out that keyboards and computers reduced the need for handwriting, and calculators automated basic math. But AI has “turbocharged” this kind of off-loading, especially in schools where learning can feel transactional.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As one student told the researchers, “It’s easy. You don’t need to (use) your brain.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report offers a surfeit of evidence to suggest that students who use generative AI are already seeing declines in content knowledge, critical thinking and even creativity. And this could have enormous consequences if these young people grow into adults without learning to think critically.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pro: AI can make teachers’ jobs a little easier\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The report says another benefit of AI is that it allows teachers to automate some tasks: “generating parent emails … translating materials, creating worksheets, rubrics, quizzes, and lesson plans” — and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report cites multiple research studies that found important time-saving benefits for teachers, including one U.S. study that found that teachers who use AI save an average of nearly six hours a week and about six weeks over the course of a full school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pro/Con: AI can be an engine of equity — or inequity\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>One of the strongest arguments in favor of AI’s educational use, according to the Brookings report, is its ability to reach children who have been excluded from the classroom. The researchers cite Afghanistan, where girls and women have been denied access to formal, postprimary education by the Taliban.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to the report, \u003ca href=\"https://www.sola-afghanistan.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">one program for Afghan girls\u003c/a> “has employed AI to digitize the Afghan curriculum, create lessons based on this curriculum, and disseminate content in Dari, Pashto, and English via WhatsApp lessons.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AI can also help make classrooms more accessible for students with a wide range of learning disabilities, including dyslexia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But “AI can massively increase existing divides” too, Winthrop warns. That’s because the free AI tools that are most accessible to students and schools can also be the least reliable and least factually accurate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We know that richer communities and schools will be able to afford more advanced AI models,” Winthrop says, “and we know those more advanced AI models are more accurate. Which means that this is the first time in ed-tech history that schools will have to pay more for more accurate information. And that really hurts schools without a lot of resources.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Con: AI poses serious threats to social and emotional development\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Survey responses revealed deep concern that use of AI, particularly chatbots, “is undermining students’ emotional well-being, including their ability to form relationships, recover from setbacks, and maintain mental health,” the report says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the many problems with kids’ overuse of AI is that the technology is inherently sycophantic — it has been designed to reinforce users’ beliefs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Winthrop says that if children are building social-emotional skills largely through interactions with chatbots that were designed to agree with them, “it becomes very uncomfortable to then be in an environment when somebody doesn’t agree with you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Winthrop offers an example of a child interacting with a chatbot, “complaining about your parents and saying, ‘They want me to wash the dishes — this is so annoying. I hate my parents.’ The chatbot will likely say, ‘You’re right. You’re misunderstood. I’m so sorry. I understand you.’ Versus a friend who would say, ‘Dude, I wash the dishes all the time in my house. I don’t know what you’re complaining about. That’s normal.’ That right there is the problem.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/10/08/nx-s1-5561981/ai-students-schools-teachers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">recent survey\u003c/a> from the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age, found that nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers said they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with artificial intelligence. And 42% of students in that survey said they or someone they know has used AI for companionship.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report warns that AI’s echo chamber can stunt a child’s emotional growth: “We learn empathy not when we are perfectly understood, but when we misunderstand and recover,” one of the surveyed experts said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What to do about it\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Brookings report offers a long list of recommendations to help parents, teachers and policymakers — not to mention tech companies themselves — harness the good of AI without subjecting children to the risks that the technology currently poses. Among those recommendations:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul class=\"rte2-style-ul\">\n\u003cli>Schooling itself could be less focused on what the report calls “transactional task completion” or a grade-based endgame and more focused on fostering curiosity and a desire to learn. Students will be less inclined to ask AI to do the work for them if they feel engaged by that work.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>AI designed for use by children and teens should be less sycophantic and more “antagonistic,” pushing back against preconceived notions and challenging users to reflect and evaluate.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Tech companies could collaborate with educators in “co-design hubs.” In the Netherlands, a government-backed hub already brings together tech companies and educators to develop, test and evaluate new AI applications in the classroom.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Holistic AI literacy is crucial — both for teachers and students. Some countries, including China and Estonia, have comprehensive, national AI literacy guidelines.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>As schools continue to embrace AI, it’s important that underfunded districts in marginalized communities are not left behind, allowing AI to further drive inequity.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Governments have a responsibility to regulate the use of AI in schools, making sure that the technology being used protects students’ cognitive and emotional health, as well as their privacy. In the U.S., the Trump administration has \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/eliminating-state-law-obstruction-of-national-artificial-intelligence-policy/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tried to prohibit\u003c/a> states from regulating AI on their own, even as Congress has so far failed to create a federal regulatory framework.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With this “premortem,” the authors argue, the time to act is now. AI’s risks to children and teens are already abundant and obvious. The good news is: so are many of the remedies.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The risks of using \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/65296/with-ai-changing-everything-heres-how-teachers-can-shape-the-new-culture-of-learning\">generative artificial intelligence\u003c/a> to educate children and teens currently overshadow the benefits, according to a new study by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sweeping study includes focus groups and interviews with K-12 students, parents, educators and tech experts in 50 countries, as well as a literature review of hundreds of research articles. It found that using AI in education can “undermine children’s foundational development” and that “the damages it has already caused are daunting,” though “fixable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Because generative AI is still young — ChatGPT was released \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">just over three years ago\u003c/a> — the report’s authors dubbed their review a “premortem” intended to study AI’s potential in the classroom without a postmortem’s benefits of time, long-term data or hindsight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are some of the pros and cons that the report lays out, along with a sampling of the study’s recommendations for teachers, parents, school leaders and government officials:\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pro: AI can help students learn to read and write\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Teachers surveyed for the report said AI can be useful when it comes to language acquisition, especially for students learning a second language. For example, AI can adjust the complexity of a passage depending on the reader’s skill, and it offers privacy for students who struggle in large-group settings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers reported that AI can also help improve students’ writing, so long as it is used to support students’ efforts and not to do the work for them: “Teachers report that AI can ‘spark creativity’ and help students overcome writer’s block. … At the drafting stage, it can help with organization, coherence, syntax, semantics, and grammar. At the revision stage, AI can support the editing and rewriting of ideas as well as help with … punctuation, capitalization, and grammar.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, if there is a refrain in the report, it is this: AI is most useful when it’s supplementing, not replacing, the efforts of a flesh-and-blood teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Con: AI poses a grave threat to students’ cognitive development\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>At the top of Brookings’ list of risks is the negative effect AI can have on children’s cognitive growth — how they learn new skills and perceive and solve problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report describes a kind of doom loop of AI dependence, where students increasingly off-load their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rebecca Winthrop, one of the report’s authors and a senior fellow at Brookings, warns, “When kids use generative AI that tells them what the answer is … they are not thinking for themselves. They’re not learning to parse truth from fiction. They’re not learning to understand what makes a good argument. They’re not learning about different perspectives in the world because they’re actually not engaging in the material.\u003cem>“\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cognitive off-loading isn’t new. The report points out that keyboards and computers reduced the need for handwriting, and calculators automated basic math. But AI has “turbocharged” this kind of off-loading, especially in schools where learning can feel transactional.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As one student told the researchers, “It’s easy. You don’t need to (use) your brain.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report offers a surfeit of evidence to suggest that students who use generative AI are already seeing declines in content knowledge, critical thinking and even creativity. And this could have enormous consequences if these young people grow into adults without learning to think critically.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pro: AI can make teachers’ jobs a little easier\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The report says another benefit of AI is that it allows teachers to automate some tasks: “generating parent emails … translating materials, creating worksheets, rubrics, quizzes, and lesson plans” — and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report cites multiple research studies that found important time-saving benefits for teachers, including one U.S. study that found that teachers who use AI save an average of nearly six hours a week and about six weeks over the course of a full school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pro/Con: AI can be an engine of equity — or inequity\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>One of the strongest arguments in favor of AI’s educational use, according to the Brookings report, is its ability to reach children who have been excluded from the classroom. The researchers cite Afghanistan, where girls and women have been denied access to formal, postprimary education by the Taliban.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to the report, \u003ca href=\"https://www.sola-afghanistan.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">one program for Afghan girls\u003c/a> “has employed AI to digitize the Afghan curriculum, create lessons based on this curriculum, and disseminate content in Dari, Pashto, and English via WhatsApp lessons.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AI can also help make classrooms more accessible for students with a wide range of learning disabilities, including dyslexia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But “AI can massively increase existing divides” too, Winthrop warns. That’s because the free AI tools that are most accessible to students and schools can also be the least reliable and least factually accurate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We know that richer communities and schools will be able to afford more advanced AI models,” Winthrop says, “and we know those more advanced AI models are more accurate. Which means that this is the first time in ed-tech history that schools will have to pay more for more accurate information. And that really hurts schools without a lot of resources.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Con: AI poses serious threats to social and emotional development\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Survey responses revealed deep concern that use of AI, particularly chatbots, “is undermining students’ emotional well-being, including their ability to form relationships, recover from setbacks, and maintain mental health,” the report says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the many problems with kids’ overuse of AI is that the technology is inherently sycophantic — it has been designed to reinforce users’ beliefs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Winthrop says that if children are building social-emotional skills largely through interactions with chatbots that were designed to agree with them, “it becomes very uncomfortable to then be in an environment when somebody doesn’t agree with you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Winthrop offers an example of a child interacting with a chatbot, “complaining about your parents and saying, ‘They want me to wash the dishes — this is so annoying. I hate my parents.’ The chatbot will likely say, ‘You’re right. You’re misunderstood. I’m so sorry. I understand you.’ Versus a friend who would say, ‘Dude, I wash the dishes all the time in my house. I don’t know what you’re complaining about. That’s normal.’ That right there is the problem.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/10/08/nx-s1-5561981/ai-students-schools-teachers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">recent survey\u003c/a> from the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age, found that nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers said they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with artificial intelligence. And 42% of students in that survey said they or someone they know has used AI for companionship.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report warns that AI’s echo chamber can stunt a child’s emotional growth: “We learn empathy not when we are perfectly understood, but when we misunderstand and recover,” one of the surveyed experts said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What to do about it\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Brookings report offers a long list of recommendations to help parents, teachers and policymakers — not to mention tech companies themselves — harness the good of AI without subjecting children to the risks that the technology currently poses. Among those recommendations:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul class=\"rte2-style-ul\">\n\u003cli>Schooling itself could be less focused on what the report calls “transactional task completion” or a grade-based endgame and more focused on fostering curiosity and a desire to learn. Students will be less inclined to ask AI to do the work for them if they feel engaged by that work.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>AI designed for use by children and teens should be less sycophantic and more “antagonistic,” pushing back against preconceived notions and challenging users to reflect and evaluate.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Tech companies could collaborate with educators in “co-design hubs.” In the Netherlands, a government-backed hub already brings together tech companies and educators to develop, test and evaluate new AI applications in the classroom.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Holistic AI literacy is crucial — both for teachers and students. Some countries, including China and Estonia, have comprehensive, national AI literacy guidelines.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>As schools continue to embrace AI, it’s important that underfunded districts in marginalized communities are not left behind, allowing AI to further drive inequity.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Governments have a responsibility to regulate the use of AI in schools, making sure that the technology being used protects students’ cognitive and emotional health, as well as their privacy. In the U.S., the Trump administration has \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/eliminating-state-law-obstruction-of-national-artificial-intelligence-policy/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tried to prohibit\u003c/a> states from regulating AI on their own, even as Congress has so far failed to create a federal regulatory framework.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Ailsa Ostovitz has been accused of using AI on three assignments in two different classes this school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s mentally exhausting because it’s like I know this is my work,” says Ostovitz, 17. “I know that this is my brain putting words and concepts onto paper for other people to comprehend.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Ostovitz, a junior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., shared with NPR one of the accusations she received from a teacher. The message, from September, included a screenshot from an AI detection program showing a 30.76% probability Ostovitz had used AI on a writing assignment that included a description of the music she listens to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I write about music. I love music. Why would I use AI to write something that I like talking about?” Ostovitz says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ostovitz reached out to her teacher about the assignment via the school’s online learning platform. “I said, seriously, I didn’t use AI. Can you try a different detector?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The teacher didn’t respond, and docked Ostovitz’s grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ostovitz’s mom, Stephanie Rizk, says her daughter is a high-achieving student who cares about doing well in school and she was alarmed when the teacher jumped to conclusions about Ostovitz’s work so early in the school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Get to know their level of skill, and then maybe your AI detector is useful,” Rizk says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rizk told NPR she met with the teacher in mid-November and the teacher said they never saw her daughter’s message.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/4500x3000+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fb7%2F5f%2F00fd856e4f39a758216bbe6df52b%2Fnpr-ed-harlan-ai-detection-software-education-schools-27.jpg\" alt=\"Ostovitz says she now runs all her homework assignments through multiple AI detection tools before she turns them in.\">\u003cfigcaption>Ostovitz says she now runs all her homework assignments through multiple AI detection tools before she turns them in. \u003ccite> (Beck Harlan | NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The school district, Prince George’s County Public Schools, made clear in a statement that Ostovitz’s teacher used an AI detection tool on their own and that the district doesn’t pay for this software.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“During staff training, we advise educators not to rely on such tools, as multiple sources have documented their potential inaccuracies and inconsistencies,” the statement said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PGCPS declined to make Ostovitz’s teacher available for an interview. Rizk told NPR that after their meeting, the teacher no longer believed Ostovitz used AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But what happened to Ostovitz isn’t surprising.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More than 40% of surveyed 6th- to 12th-grade teachers used AI detection tools during the last school year, according to \u003ca href=\"https://cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/FINAL-CDT-2025-Hand-in-Hand-Polling-100225-accessible.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a nationally representative poll\u003c/a> by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s despite \u003ca href=\"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389114020_Accuracy_and_Reliability_of_AI-Generated_Text_Detection_Tools_A_Literature_Review\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">numerous\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40979-023-00146-z\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">research\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41239-024-00487-w\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">studies\u003c/a> showing that AI detection tools are far from reliable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s now fairly well established in the academic integrity field that these tools are not fit for purpose,” says Mike Perkins, a leading researcher on academic integrity and AI at British University Vietnam.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perkins found that some of the most popular AI detectors — including Turnitin, GPTZero and Copyleaks — flagged some things as AI that weren’t, and vice versa. Their accuracy rates dropped even further when AI text was manipulated to appear more human.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We saw some really concerning problems with some of the most prolific AI text detection tools,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite those problems, NPR found that school districts from Utah to Ohio to \u003ca href=\"https://mynbc15.com/news/local/mobile-county-public-schools-using-ai-to-catch-students-using-it-to-cheat\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Alabama\u003c/a> are spending thousands of dollars on these tools.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Why one of the nation’s largest districts uses AI detection software\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Near Miami, Broward County Public Schools is spending more than $550,000 on a three-year contract with Turnitin. The long-standing ed-tech company has historically provided schools with plagiarism detection software; in 2023, it introduced an AI detection feature. When educators put student work through this tool, it generates a percentage, which reflects the amount of text the software determines was likely generated by AI. One caveat: \u003ca href=\"https://guides.turnitin.com/hc/en-us/articles/22774058814093-AI-writing-detection-in-the-new-enhanced-Similarity-Report\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">According to the company\u003c/a>, scores of 20% or lower are less reliable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Turnitin tool is something that helps us facilitate conversation and feedback, not grading,” says Sherri Wilson, director of innovative learning for the Broward school district, which enrolls more than 230,000 students and is one of the largest school districts in the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wilson says the district is “totally aware” of the research showing AI detection tools, including Turnitin, aren’t 100% accurate or reliable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Turnitin also acknowledges this: \u003ca href=\"https://guides.turnitin.com/hc/en-us/articles/28457596598925-AI-writing-detection-in-the-classic-report-view#h_01J2XYZH1SEN7QAZZSDHZVF1P2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">On the company’s website\u003c/a>, it says, “our AI writing detection may not always be accurate … so it should not be used as the sole basis for adverse actions against a student.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Turnitin wrote in a statement to NPR that it’s more important to avoid falsely accusing students of cheating than to catch all AI writing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wilson says the Turnitin tool is still valuable because it saves teachers time by quickly scanning student work for suspected AI use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another reason that Broward teachers have access to the tool, Wilson says, is that the district participates in academic programs, such as International Baccalaureate, or IB, in which student work must be authenticated by teachers before it is sent out for external review.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both of the programs Broward offers, IB and International Education at Cambridge, told NPR that schools are not required to use AI detection software as part of the authentication process. Nonetheless, Broward told NPR in a statement, “we have chosen to provide our teachers with [Turnitin] as one of the tools to meet the requirements.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Wilson says teachers are the ultimate authority on whether a student’s work is their own — not the AI detection tool.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They’re using these tools as feedback to then have those teachable moments with students,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Why one teacher uses AI detection tools\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Language and literature teacher John Grady says, for him, AI detection tools provide “a jumping off point” to start a conversation with a student who may have used AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/3000x2000+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fa9%2F06%2F57e19a7d4b1bbc3005b0769098da%2F251112-aidetectiontools-johngrady-007.jpg\" alt=\"Shaker Heights High School teacher John Grady says he puts all student essays through GPTZero – but it isn't the only tool he relies on to determine if a student's work is their own. \">\u003cfigcaption>Shaker Heights High School teacher John Grady says he puts all student essays through GPTZero – but it isn’t the only tool he relies on to determine if a student’s work is their own. \u003ccite> (Dustin Franz for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It’s certainly not foolproof,” he says. “But it gives you something to hang your hat on.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grady teaches at Shaker Heights High School, part of the Shaker Heights City School District outside Cleveland. The district serves roughly 4,400 students, and is paying GPTZero, another AI detection software company, about $5,600 this year for annual licenses for 27 of the district’s teachers. The tool calculates a percentage likelihood that a student’s work is AI-generated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grady says he puts all student essays through GPTZero; if the tool shows more than a 50% likelihood AI was used for the assignment, Grady digs deeper. That includes using revision history tools to see how much time a student spent on an assignment, and how many edits they made during the writing process. If it appears that a student made only a few edits and spent hardly any time writing, he’ll check in with that student.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And I’ll say, ‘Hey, this flagged. Can you talk to me about why?’ I’d say the bulk of the time, like 75%, if it was AI, they’d be like, ‘Yeah, I did.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, well now you’ve got to rewrite it with less credit,'” Grady says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Edward Tian, co-founder and CEO of GPTZero, says this is how educators \u003cem>should\u003c/em> be using his company’s tool.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We definitely don’t believe this is a punishment tool,” Tian says. “This needs to be a tool in the toolkit and not the final smoking gun.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says it’s important to understand that a GPTZero probability score under 50% means it’s more likely the text was human versus AI-generated. He says scores over 50% warrant closer examination — like what Grady describes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tian doesn’t dispute the research that shows GPTZero isn’t always reliable. But he notes that there are educators, like Grady, who still find it valuable for the information it provides.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says that tools like his offer a “signal on what’s happening in your classroom” but that teachers should always follow up with students if that signal shows something concerning.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The AI detection skeptics\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Shaker Heights junior Zi Shi, whose first language is Mandarin, says his writing style can sometimes look like AI “because of the repetition of words I use. I feel like it’s because of how limited my vocabulary is.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shi — who isn’t a student of Grady’s — says he’s still working on his writing skills and he’s concerned that AI detection software might be biased against non-native English speakers like himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some educators share this concern, though the research so far is limited and contradictory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shi says an assignment he completed for his English class earlier this fall was flagged by GPTZero as possibly AI-generated. He says his teacher suggested that his use of an online tool called Grammarly may have triggered the detection software. Grammarly uses AI to correct grammar and, if prompted, generate text. (The teacher confirmed Shi’s account with NPR.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shi says he only used Grammarly to clean up his writing and that he wrote the assignment himself. “It was definitely disappointing to see the comment of it being flagged as AI,” Shi says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shi thinks AI detectors should be thought of as a “smoke alarm, where it’s a sign, or warning. But, you know, sometimes it could be like a false alarm.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He questions whether the school district should be spending thousands of dollars on AI detection software. He says that money could be better spent on professional development for teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carrie Cofer, a high school English teacher in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District — just a few miles from Shaker Heights — shares that view.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last year, as an experiment, she uploaded a chapter of her Ph.D. dissertation into GPTZero. “And it came up with like 89% or 91% AI-written, and I’m like, ‘Oh, no, I don’t think that’s right, because it was all mine,'” Cofer says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/3000x2000+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fad%2F56%2F029881c04814ad2115c526051ab3%2F251112-aidetectiontools-carrie-cofer-002.jpg\" alt=\"In Cleveland, English teacher Carrie Cofer says educators will need to adapt to AI by changing how they teach and assess student learning.\">\u003cfigcaption>In Cleveland, English teacher Carrie Cofer says educators will need to adapt to AI by changing how they teach and assess student learning. \u003ccite> (Dustin Franz for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Cofer is helping her district shape its AI policy and guidelines; she says Cleveland schools don’t currently pay for AI detection software and she’d advocate against it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think it’s an efficacious use of their money,” Cofer says. “The kids are going to get around it one way or the other.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some workarounds that students could turn to include using AI detection software themselves, to workshop assignments so they don’t get flagged, and using \u003ca href=\"https://www.grammarly.com/ai-humanizer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">“AI humanizer” programs\u003c/a>, which claim to make AI-generated writing appear more human.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ultimately, she says, teachers will need to adapt to AI by changing how they teach and assess student learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back in Maryland, high school junior Ailsa Ostovitz is also adapting. She now runs all her homework assignments through multiple AI detection tools before she turns them in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The writing is her own, she says, but she’ll rewrite sentences the software identifies as possibly AI-generated, an extra step that adds about half an hour to every assignment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think I’ve definitely become more vigilant about presenting my work as mine and not AI,” she explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She doesn’t want to take any chances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This reporting was supported by a grant from the \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tarbellcenter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Tarbell Center for AI Journalism\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited by: Nicole Cohen\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Visual design and development by: LA Johnson\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Audio story produced by: Lauren Migaki\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How can you tell if a student has used artificial intelligence to do their schoolwork? Teachers say it’s a huge challenge. Many are turning to AI detection software for help. Just one problem – this software doesn’t always work. So what does that mean for students? Reporter Lee Gaines has the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LEE GAINES: High school junior Ailsa Ostovitz has been accused of using AI to complete her homework assignments three times so far this school year in two different classes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AILSA OSTOVITZ: It’s mentally exhausting because it’s, like, I know this is my work. I know that this is, like, my brain putting words and concepts onto paper for other people to comprehend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: The 17-year-old attends Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland. She shared messages she received from a teacher. In one case from September, the teacher sent her a screenshot from an AI detection program. It showed about a 30% probability she had used AI to complete a writing assignment. That assignment included a description of the music she listens to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OSTOVITZ: I write about music. I love music. Why would I use AI to write something that I like talking about?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Ostovitz lost points on the assignment. She sent a message to her teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OSTOVITZ: I said, seriously, I didn’t use AI. Can you try a different detector?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: But she never heard back. Ostovitz’s mom, Stephanie Rizk, told NPR she met with the teacher in mid-November. The teacher said they never saw Ostovitz’s message. Her district, Prince George’s County Public Schools, made clear in a statement that Ostovitz’s teacher used an AI detection tool on their own, and the district doesn’t pay for this software. It said, quote, “during staff training, we advise educators not to rely on such tools, as multiple sources have documented their potential inaccuracies and inconsistencies.” The district declined to make the teacher available for an interview.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OSTOVITZ: I think I’ve definitely become more vigilant with presenting my work as mine and not AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Ostovitz says the experience changed the way she does her homework. She now runs all her assignments through AI detection software.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OSTOVITZ: That part is really frustrating, where I am putting it through AI checkers and then rewriting my own work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Rizk told NPR that after their meeting, the teacher said they no longer believe Ostovitz used AI. What happened to Ostovitz isn’t totally surprising. Numerous research studies have found that AI detection tools are far from perfect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MIKE PERKINS: We saw some really concerning problems with some of the most prolific AI text detection tools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Mike Perkins is a leading researcher on academic integrity at British University Vietnam. He found that some of the most popular AI detectors flagged some things as AI that weren’t, and vice versa.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PERKINS: And it’s now fairly well established in the academic integrity field that these tools are not fit for purpose.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Not fit for purpose – and yet, more than 40% of surveyed middle and high school teachers used AI detection tools during the last school year. That’s according to a nationally representative poll by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital rights.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SHERRI WILSON: The Turnitin tool is something that helps us facilitate conversation and feedback, not grading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Sherri Wilson is director of innovative learning for Broward County Public Schools in Florida, one of the largest districts in the country. It has a contract with a company called Turnitin for plagiarism and AI detection – a contract worth more than half a million dollars. Wilson says she knows AI detection tools like Turnitin aren’t always accurate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>WILSON: That is why the human agency can never be removed in this process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: In a statement, Turnitin says their AI detection tool is just one data point in assessing whether a student’s work is their own. It also says it’s more important to avoid falsely accusing students than to catch all AI writing. Wilson says teachers aren’t automatically punishing students if their work is flagged as AI-generated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>WILSON: They’re using these tools as feedback to then have those teachable moments with students to recalibrate and resubmit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: That’s how John Grady uses AI detection software. He teaches language and literature courses at Shaker Heights High School outside Cleveland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOHN GRADY: So usually I just call a student over, and I’ll show them the report. And I’ll say, hey, this flagged. Can you talk to me about why? I’d say the bulk of the time – like 75% – if it was AI they’d be like, oh, yeah, I did. And I’m like, OK. Well, now you got to rewrite it with less credit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Grady’s public school district is spending about $5,600 on annual subscriptions to GPTZero, another AI detection software. He knows it isn’t 100% reliable. He also uses revision history tools that allow him to see the progression of a student’s writing over time. One thing he likes about GPTZero is if he’s suspicious about a student’s assignment…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GRADY: It’s something to kind of hang your hat on, where I can say, like, look, it’s been flagged.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>EDWARD TIAN: We definitely don’t believe this is a punishment tool.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: That’s GPTZero CEO, Edward Tian. He doesn’t dispute the research that says GPTZero and other tools aren’t always accurate, but he says they can still help teachers. For example, if his software finds a more than 50% probability that an essay was written by AI, Tian says that should trigger further investigation by the teacher. It should never be the sole measure of whether a student’s work is their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TIAN: But if this is a conversation starter, actually we found a lot of teachers get a lot of value there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Just a few miles away from Shaker Heights, teacher Carrie Cofer thinks AI detection tools are a waste of school resources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRIE COFER: I don’t think the AI detection software is reliable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: She teaches high school English in the Cleveland school district. Cofer says students who use AI have found ways to fool detectors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>COFER: Like, they go in and change a couple of words in or change something around, and it’s not going to detect that it’s AI-generated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Her district doesn’t currently pay for an AI detection tool, and Cofer says she’d advocate against it. Instead, Cofer says teachers are the best AI detectors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>COFER: You can’t replace a teacher’s experience and instinct when it comes to any kind of classroom work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: That’s one thing all the educators NPR spoke with did agree on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For NPR News, I’m Lee Gaines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KELLY: And that reporting was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Ailsa Ostovitz has been accused of using AI on three assignments in two different classes this school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s mentally exhausting because it’s like I know this is my work,” says Ostovitz, 17. “I know that this is my brain putting words and concepts onto paper for other people to comprehend.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Ostovitz, a junior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., shared with NPR one of the accusations she received from a teacher. The message, from September, included a screenshot from an AI detection program showing a 30.76% probability Ostovitz had used AI on a writing assignment that included a description of the music she listens to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I write about music. I love music. Why would I use AI to write something that I like talking about?” Ostovitz says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ostovitz reached out to her teacher about the assignment via the school’s online learning platform. “I said, seriously, I didn’t use AI. Can you try a different detector?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The teacher didn’t respond, and docked Ostovitz’s grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ostovitz’s mom, Stephanie Rizk, says her daughter is a high-achieving student who cares about doing well in school and she was alarmed when the teacher jumped to conclusions about Ostovitz’s work so early in the school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Get to know their level of skill, and then maybe your AI detector is useful,” Rizk says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rizk told NPR she met with the teacher in mid-November and the teacher said they never saw her daughter’s message.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/4500x3000+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fb7%2F5f%2F00fd856e4f39a758216bbe6df52b%2Fnpr-ed-harlan-ai-detection-software-education-schools-27.jpg\" alt=\"Ostovitz says she now runs all her homework assignments through multiple AI detection tools before she turns them in.\">\u003cfigcaption>Ostovitz says she now runs all her homework assignments through multiple AI detection tools before she turns them in. \u003ccite> (Beck Harlan | NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The school district, Prince George’s County Public Schools, made clear in a statement that Ostovitz’s teacher used an AI detection tool on their own and that the district doesn’t pay for this software.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“During staff training, we advise educators not to rely on such tools, as multiple sources have documented their potential inaccuracies and inconsistencies,” the statement said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PGCPS declined to make Ostovitz’s teacher available for an interview. Rizk told NPR that after their meeting, the teacher no longer believed Ostovitz used AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But what happened to Ostovitz isn’t surprising.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More than 40% of surveyed 6th- to 12th-grade teachers used AI detection tools during the last school year, according to \u003ca href=\"https://cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/FINAL-CDT-2025-Hand-in-Hand-Polling-100225-accessible.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a nationally representative poll\u003c/a> by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s despite \u003ca href=\"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389114020_Accuracy_and_Reliability_of_AI-Generated_Text_Detection_Tools_A_Literature_Review\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">numerous\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40979-023-00146-z\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">research\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41239-024-00487-w\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">studies\u003c/a> showing that AI detection tools are far from reliable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s now fairly well established in the academic integrity field that these tools are not fit for purpose,” says Mike Perkins, a leading researcher on academic integrity and AI at British University Vietnam.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perkins found that some of the most popular AI detectors — including Turnitin, GPTZero and Copyleaks — flagged some things as AI that weren’t, and vice versa. Their accuracy rates dropped even further when AI text was manipulated to appear more human.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We saw some really concerning problems with some of the most prolific AI text detection tools,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite those problems, NPR found that school districts from Utah to Ohio to \u003ca href=\"https://mynbc15.com/news/local/mobile-county-public-schools-using-ai-to-catch-students-using-it-to-cheat\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Alabama\u003c/a> are spending thousands of dollars on these tools.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Why one of the nation’s largest districts uses AI detection software\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Near Miami, Broward County Public Schools is spending more than $550,000 on a three-year contract with Turnitin. The long-standing ed-tech company has historically provided schools with plagiarism detection software; in 2023, it introduced an AI detection feature. When educators put student work through this tool, it generates a percentage, which reflects the amount of text the software determines was likely generated by AI. One caveat: \u003ca href=\"https://guides.turnitin.com/hc/en-us/articles/22774058814093-AI-writing-detection-in-the-new-enhanced-Similarity-Report\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">According to the company\u003c/a>, scores of 20% or lower are less reliable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Turnitin tool is something that helps us facilitate conversation and feedback, not grading,” says Sherri Wilson, director of innovative learning for the Broward school district, which enrolls more than 230,000 students and is one of the largest school districts in the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wilson says the district is “totally aware” of the research showing AI detection tools, including Turnitin, aren’t 100% accurate or reliable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Turnitin also acknowledges this: \u003ca href=\"https://guides.turnitin.com/hc/en-us/articles/28457596598925-AI-writing-detection-in-the-classic-report-view#h_01J2XYZH1SEN7QAZZSDHZVF1P2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">On the company’s website\u003c/a>, it says, “our AI writing detection may not always be accurate … so it should not be used as the sole basis for adverse actions against a student.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Turnitin wrote in a statement to NPR that it’s more important to avoid falsely accusing students of cheating than to catch all AI writing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wilson says the Turnitin tool is still valuable because it saves teachers time by quickly scanning student work for suspected AI use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another reason that Broward teachers have access to the tool, Wilson says, is that the district participates in academic programs, such as International Baccalaureate, or IB, in which student work must be authenticated by teachers before it is sent out for external review.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both of the programs Broward offers, IB and International Education at Cambridge, told NPR that schools are not required to use AI detection software as part of the authentication process. Nonetheless, Broward told NPR in a statement, “we have chosen to provide our teachers with [Turnitin] as one of the tools to meet the requirements.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Wilson says teachers are the ultimate authority on whether a student’s work is their own — not the AI detection tool.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They’re using these tools as feedback to then have those teachable moments with students,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Why one teacher uses AI detection tools\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Language and literature teacher John Grady says, for him, AI detection tools provide “a jumping off point” to start a conversation with a student who may have used AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/3000x2000+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fa9%2F06%2F57e19a7d4b1bbc3005b0769098da%2F251112-aidetectiontools-johngrady-007.jpg\" alt=\"Shaker Heights High School teacher John Grady says he puts all student essays through GPTZero – but it isn't the only tool he relies on to determine if a student's work is their own. \">\u003cfigcaption>Shaker Heights High School teacher John Grady says he puts all student essays through GPTZero – but it isn’t the only tool he relies on to determine if a student’s work is their own. \u003ccite> (Dustin Franz for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It’s certainly not foolproof,” he says. “But it gives you something to hang your hat on.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grady teaches at Shaker Heights High School, part of the Shaker Heights City School District outside Cleveland. The district serves roughly 4,400 students, and is paying GPTZero, another AI detection software company, about $5,600 this year for annual licenses for 27 of the district’s teachers. The tool calculates a percentage likelihood that a student’s work is AI-generated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grady says he puts all student essays through GPTZero; if the tool shows more than a 50% likelihood AI was used for the assignment, Grady digs deeper. That includes using revision history tools to see how much time a student spent on an assignment, and how many edits they made during the writing process. If it appears that a student made only a few edits and spent hardly any time writing, he’ll check in with that student.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And I’ll say, ‘Hey, this flagged. Can you talk to me about why?’ I’d say the bulk of the time, like 75%, if it was AI, they’d be like, ‘Yeah, I did.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, well now you’ve got to rewrite it with less credit,'” Grady says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Edward Tian, co-founder and CEO of GPTZero, says this is how educators \u003cem>should\u003c/em> be using his company’s tool.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We definitely don’t believe this is a punishment tool,” Tian says. “This needs to be a tool in the toolkit and not the final smoking gun.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says it’s important to understand that a GPTZero probability score under 50% means it’s more likely the text was human versus AI-generated. He says scores over 50% warrant closer examination — like what Grady describes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tian doesn’t dispute the research that shows GPTZero isn’t always reliable. But he notes that there are educators, like Grady, who still find it valuable for the information it provides.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says that tools like his offer a “signal on what’s happening in your classroom” but that teachers should always follow up with students if that signal shows something concerning.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The AI detection skeptics\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Shaker Heights junior Zi Shi, whose first language is Mandarin, says his writing style can sometimes look like AI “because of the repetition of words I use. I feel like it’s because of how limited my vocabulary is.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shi — who isn’t a student of Grady’s — says he’s still working on his writing skills and he’s concerned that AI detection software might be biased against non-native English speakers like himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some educators share this concern, though the research so far is limited and contradictory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shi says an assignment he completed for his English class earlier this fall was flagged by GPTZero as possibly AI-generated. He says his teacher suggested that his use of an online tool called Grammarly may have triggered the detection software. Grammarly uses AI to correct grammar and, if prompted, generate text. (The teacher confirmed Shi’s account with NPR.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shi says he only used Grammarly to clean up his writing and that he wrote the assignment himself. “It was definitely disappointing to see the comment of it being flagged as AI,” Shi says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shi thinks AI detectors should be thought of as a “smoke alarm, where it’s a sign, or warning. But, you know, sometimes it could be like a false alarm.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He questions whether the school district should be spending thousands of dollars on AI detection software. He says that money could be better spent on professional development for teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carrie Cofer, a high school English teacher in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District — just a few miles from Shaker Heights — shares that view.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last year, as an experiment, she uploaded a chapter of her Ph.D. dissertation into GPTZero. “And it came up with like 89% or 91% AI-written, and I’m like, ‘Oh, no, I don’t think that’s right, because it was all mine,'” Cofer says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/3000x2000+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fad%2F56%2F029881c04814ad2115c526051ab3%2F251112-aidetectiontools-carrie-cofer-002.jpg\" alt=\"In Cleveland, English teacher Carrie Cofer says educators will need to adapt to AI by changing how they teach and assess student learning.\">\u003cfigcaption>In Cleveland, English teacher Carrie Cofer says educators will need to adapt to AI by changing how they teach and assess student learning. \u003ccite> (Dustin Franz for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Cofer is helping her district shape its AI policy and guidelines; she says Cleveland schools don’t currently pay for AI detection software and she’d advocate against it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think it’s an efficacious use of their money,” Cofer says. “The kids are going to get around it one way or the other.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some workarounds that students could turn to include using AI detection software themselves, to workshop assignments so they don’t get flagged, and using \u003ca href=\"https://www.grammarly.com/ai-humanizer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">“AI humanizer” programs\u003c/a>, which claim to make AI-generated writing appear more human.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ultimately, she says, teachers will need to adapt to AI by changing how they teach and assess student learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back in Maryland, high school junior Ailsa Ostovitz is also adapting. She now runs all her homework assignments through multiple AI detection tools before she turns them in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The writing is her own, she says, but she’ll rewrite sentences the software identifies as possibly AI-generated, an extra step that adds about half an hour to every assignment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think I’ve definitely become more vigilant about presenting my work as mine and not AI,” she explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She doesn’t want to take any chances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This reporting was supported by a grant from the \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tarbellcenter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Tarbell Center for AI Journalism\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited by: Nicole Cohen\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Visual design and development by: LA Johnson\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Audio story produced by: Lauren Migaki\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How can you tell if a student has used artificial intelligence to do their schoolwork? Teachers say it’s a huge challenge. Many are turning to AI detection software for help. Just one problem – this software doesn’t always work. So what does that mean for students? Reporter Lee Gaines has the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LEE GAINES: High school junior Ailsa Ostovitz has been accused of using AI to complete her homework assignments three times so far this school year in two different classes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AILSA OSTOVITZ: It’s mentally exhausting because it’s, like, I know this is my work. I know that this is, like, my brain putting words and concepts onto paper for other people to comprehend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: The 17-year-old attends Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland. She shared messages she received from a teacher. In one case from September, the teacher sent her a screenshot from an AI detection program. It showed about a 30% probability she had used AI to complete a writing assignment. That assignment included a description of the music she listens to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OSTOVITZ: I write about music. I love music. Why would I use AI to write something that I like talking about?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Ostovitz lost points on the assignment. She sent a message to her teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OSTOVITZ: I said, seriously, I didn’t use AI. Can you try a different detector?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: But she never heard back. Ostovitz’s mom, Stephanie Rizk, told NPR she met with the teacher in mid-November. The teacher said they never saw Ostovitz’s message. Her district, Prince George’s County Public Schools, made clear in a statement that Ostovitz’s teacher used an AI detection tool on their own, and the district doesn’t pay for this software. It said, quote, “during staff training, we advise educators not to rely on such tools, as multiple sources have documented their potential inaccuracies and inconsistencies.” The district declined to make the teacher available for an interview.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OSTOVITZ: I think I’ve definitely become more vigilant with presenting my work as mine and not AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Ostovitz says the experience changed the way she does her homework. She now runs all her assignments through AI detection software.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OSTOVITZ: That part is really frustrating, where I am putting it through AI checkers and then rewriting my own work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Rizk told NPR that after their meeting, the teacher said they no longer believe Ostovitz used AI. What happened to Ostovitz isn’t totally surprising. Numerous research studies have found that AI detection tools are far from perfect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MIKE PERKINS: We saw some really concerning problems with some of the most prolific AI text detection tools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Mike Perkins is a leading researcher on academic integrity at British University Vietnam. He found that some of the most popular AI detectors flagged some things as AI that weren’t, and vice versa.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PERKINS: And it’s now fairly well established in the academic integrity field that these tools are not fit for purpose.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Not fit for purpose – and yet, more than 40% of surveyed middle and high school teachers used AI detection tools during the last school year. That’s according to a nationally representative poll by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital rights.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SHERRI WILSON: The Turnitin tool is something that helps us facilitate conversation and feedback, not grading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Sherri Wilson is director of innovative learning for Broward County Public Schools in Florida, one of the largest districts in the country. It has a contract with a company called Turnitin for plagiarism and AI detection – a contract worth more than half a million dollars. Wilson says she knows AI detection tools like Turnitin aren’t always accurate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>WILSON: That is why the human agency can never be removed in this process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: In a statement, Turnitin says their AI detection tool is just one data point in assessing whether a student’s work is their own. It also says it’s more important to avoid falsely accusing students than to catch all AI writing. Wilson says teachers aren’t automatically punishing students if their work is flagged as AI-generated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>WILSON: They’re using these tools as feedback to then have those teachable moments with students to recalibrate and resubmit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: That’s how John Grady uses AI detection software. He teaches language and literature courses at Shaker Heights High School outside Cleveland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOHN GRADY: So usually I just call a student over, and I’ll show them the report. And I’ll say, hey, this flagged. Can you talk to me about why? I’d say the bulk of the time – like 75% – if it was AI they’d be like, oh, yeah, I did. And I’m like, OK. Well, now you got to rewrite it with less credit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Grady’s public school district is spending about $5,600 on annual subscriptions to GPTZero, another AI detection software. He knows it isn’t 100% reliable. He also uses revision history tools that allow him to see the progression of a student’s writing over time. One thing he likes about GPTZero is if he’s suspicious about a student’s assignment…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GRADY: It’s something to kind of hang your hat on, where I can say, like, look, it’s been flagged.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>EDWARD TIAN: We definitely don’t believe this is a punishment tool.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: That’s GPTZero CEO, Edward Tian. He doesn’t dispute the research that says GPTZero and other tools aren’t always accurate, but he says they can still help teachers. For example, if his software finds a more than 50% probability that an essay was written by AI, Tian says that should trigger further investigation by the teacher. It should never be the sole measure of whether a student’s work is their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TIAN: But if this is a conversation starter, actually we found a lot of teachers get a lot of value there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Just a few miles away from Shaker Heights, teacher Carrie Cofer thinks AI detection tools are a waste of school resources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRIE COFER: I don’t think the AI detection software is reliable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: She teaches high school English in the Cleveland school district. Cofer says students who use AI have found ways to fool detectors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>COFER: Like, they go in and change a couple of words in or change something around, and it’s not going to detect that it’s AI-generated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: Her district doesn’t currently pay for an AI detection tool, and Cofer says she’d advocate against it. Instead, Cofer says teachers are the best AI detectors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>COFER: You can’t replace a teacher’s experience and instinct when it comes to any kind of classroom work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GAINES: That’s one thing all the educators NPR spoke with did agree on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For NPR News, I’m Lee Gaines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KELLY: And that reporting was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This month MindShift is sharing an episode from MITs TeachLab podcast. Hosts Jessie Dukes and Justin Reich have interviewed teachers, school leaders and students about how the debut of ChatGPT and Generative AI is actually playing out in schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They’ve compiled their learnings into a mini series called the \u003ca href=\"https://www.teachlabpodcast.com/\">Homework Machine\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC3473844164\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cbr>\nKi Sung:\u003c/strong> Hey MindShift listeners, It’s Ki Sung.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today we’ve got a special episode to share with you. It’s from our friends at Teach Lab, a podcast about the art and craft of teaching.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In their mini series, called The Homework Machine, hosts Jesse Dukes and Justin Reich explore the reactions to AI when it first debuted as a strange new technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’ll let our friends from Teach Lab take it from here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Episode Transcript\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> This is the Teach Lab podcast, I’m Justin Reich.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> And I’m Jesse Dukes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Devon O’Neil is a high school social studies teacher in Oregon. Back in 2021, after six years of teaching, she took 2 years off while her husband attended grad school. At MIT actually. And during her break from teaching, she worked designing classroom curriculum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Devon O’Neil:\u003c/strong> Which is a super cool experience, very different from being in the classroom, and also really reinforced that I wanted to be in the classroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> When she was on her break, O’Neil missed two momentous years for schools. There was a pandemic, remote learning, hybrid learning, returning to school buildings. And when she went back to the classroom, in the fall of 2023, she said, there was some culture shock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Devon O’Neil:\u003c/strong> It was those two, like super crazy post-Covid years. So I come back, and it’s like, like those movies where the caveman, like defrost or whatever. And they’re like “what is this?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> It wasn’t just that her fellow teachers were harrowed and burned out, while she was fresh and energetic. She also noticed that the student work was, well, different from what she remembered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Devon O’Neil:\u003c/strong> I’d have these really well written paragraphs or snippets that are looked to be very well researched and all this, but not at all on topic. Grammar was off. Even the most brilliant 14-year-old still talks like a 14-year-old and still writes like a 14-year-old.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> So, the grammar was oddly good. O’Neil can see her students’ screens, and she sometimes watches them work. And, one day, she noticed they were using an unusual search engine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Devon O’Neil:\u003c/strong> Bing! I was noticing a lot of them were using Bing. To Google stuff, see even to Google stuff. And I was like, that’s the weirdest choice. Who uses Bing?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> And then, one day, she was watching a student complete a writing assignment in a google doc. And poof, a whole well-written paragraph just appeared. Out of nowhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Devon O’Neil:\u003c/strong> Like one minute it’s not there, and one minute it’s there. And, it said like “here are your results”. And they forgot to delete that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> And that’s when Devon realized her students were using ChatGPT to complete in class writing assignments. They would copy and paste the questions she would give them into Bing’s Copilot, which was a free way to use ChatGPT. Then, the students copied the answer, sometimes without any editing, right into their google document.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Devon O’Neil: \u003c/strong>Which is kind of a rookie mistake, like if they’re going to cheat, you want them to cheat a little better.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> We first talked to Devon in 2023, just a few weeks after she figured out what was going on. She says that since then, she’s gotten a lot more savvy about ChatGPT. But her experience speaks to how much can, and did, change in schools, in just a couple of years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> In November of 2022, ChatGPT was launched as a free research preview of advanced generative AI, like a pilot, or beta version. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content, especially text, but also images, videos, and music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ChatGPT is the most famous example of generative AI. There are competitors like Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and the Chinese company, DeepSeek. And rather quickly, students figured out, ChatGPT was pretty good at doing their homework for them. Devon, out of school for two years, working on curriculum, had missed the arrival of the new homework machine. But her students had not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> The arrival of chatGPT, and then fairly quick upgrades with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 within a couple of years, has been the big story in education technology since the fall of 2022.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Waterfall of news stories]\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>News anchor 1: \u003c/strong>So how does it work? Students can drop an assignment into something like ChatGPT, click a button and their homework is done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>News anchor 2: \u003c/strong>She is talking about ChatGPT. School districts like New York cities are banning it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>News anchor 3: \u003c/strong>ChatGPT is the new artificial intelligence tool causing a stir.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Schools have scrambled to figure out what to do about ChatGPT. Ban it? Embrace it? Teachers have scrambled to try to get ahead of the “cheating” problem, and to find ways in which AI can support education. Some Students have scrambled to figure out how to use AI without their teachers detecting it. And education technology companies have scrambled to create AI powered ed tech. And have made many promises about how generative AI will transform education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sal Khan:\u003c/strong> But I think we’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen, and the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> My career has been devoted to studying education technology. Over and over again, we’ve seen new technologies emerge in education, and the technology developers will promise, every time, that the new tech will transform and democratize education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sal Khan :\u003c/strong>That’s what’s about to happen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> And while the technologies do sometimes help teachers and students, those big transformations to schools, they never happen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> But there is something different about Chat GPT and other AI. Throughout history, most education technology has been adopted by schools, who hope it will help them do better work, teaching students. But Generative AI wasn’t invited into schools. Not for the most part. It crashed the party. Even if schools ban it from school laptops, students can often get around that ban, by using Bing, for example. Or they have their own laptop. Or they can access it on their mobile phone, which over 95% of teenagers have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, the kids have access to generative AI. And they’re using it, whether their teachers want them to, or not. That’s having a big impact on schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, a little about me, and this project. I am a journalist, and for the past year and a half, I’ve been working with Justin and other colleagues at MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab. We’ve interviewed over 85 teachers and school leaders, and over 35 students about how all of this is actually playing out in schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve been hearing about why students cheat using AI, what teachers are doing to stop them, and how some teachers and students have found ChatGPT to be helpful for learning. And for the next several weeks, we’re going to share what we’ve learned with you in a mini series we’re calling the Homework Machine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> And now, Jesse, who has immersed himself in this research, will be our host and guide for these episodes. Jesse, you can take it from here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Thanks Justin, but not so fast. We’re going to want your historical knowledge about educational technology to help us unpack and contextualize these stories. So stay close, and keep your mic handy. In fact, we’re going to hear from you again in this episode.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Sounds good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Alright, well, let’s go back to A beginning: December of 2022. We’ll start with Steve Ouellette. He’s a technology director at the Westwood School district, southwest of Boston. His job includes keeping track of computers and software for the district, but also helping teachers think through how to use technology in their work. He remembers the exact moment he heard about generative AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Ouellette:\u003c/strong> So I think it was, it was December 8th. And I was home sick with Covid. I got an email, I’m on a listserv, you know, with all the tech directors in Massachusetts and I got an email that said: Have AI write your next English paper. The sub caption was: Buckle up, here it comes. And someone had basically shared a video of this thing called ChatGPT, that was generating an essay about, I think it was about Raisin in the Sun. And I was like “What is going on here?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes: \u003c/strong>Watching the video, Ouellette says he immediately realized that this was a big deal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Ouellette:\u003c/strong> Yeah, that was, that was a moment. You know, I’ve been in this business since 1993 and I don’t remember having like, a really specific, like, reaction to something the way I did when I saw that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Ouellette emailed the district’s superintendent, and explained the situation to her. There was a new technological tool, available to students, that could do their schoolwork. Pretty effectively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Ouellette:\u003c/strong> And she had no idea what it was. And I explained to her what it was and sent her a link and she shot back to me five minutes later and she’s like, yeah, we need to write about this. And so we, we felt, we both felt this sense of like, urgency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> The superintendent asked Ouellette to write a memo to the district’s teachers. Ouellette is a technology guy, and out of curiosity and excitement, he decided to experiment. Could ChatGPT draft the memo? He asked ChatGPT to write the first draft and sent it to the superintendent. She read it and told Ouellette, this is pretty formal language, it doesn’t sound like you. Make it more casual sounding. But Ouellette didn’t rewrite the memo himself. He prompted ChatGPT to revise the memo. And he told it: “Make it more conversational.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Ouellette:\u003c/strong> I said, you need to write something funny about how, you know France was gonna win the World Cup. And it like, seamlessly incorporated a little like parenthetical thing about, oh by the way, France is gonna win the World Cup. And in the way it did, it was like magnificent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Here’s the memo ChatGPT wrote:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>ChatGPT: \u003c/strong> ChatGPT could also be used to help students learn other languages, such as Spanish or French (which, by the way, I think will win the 2022 World Cup). Imagine being able to have a conversation with ChatGPT in French and receiving instant corrections and feedback on your pronunciation and grammar. The possibilities are truly endless.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Side note, I’m not that impressed with how ChatGPT did with that World Cup joke. It says that “French” will win the world cup, not “France”. But, that aside, they sent the memo out that Monday. Remember, this was December of 2022.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over the next few months, Ouellette formed an AI working group in the district. They brought in a guest speaker. They looked at academic policies. They talked to teachers and students. And by the summer of 2023, they had revised academic integrity guidelines as well as some basic training for teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Ouellette:\u003c/strong> The goal was to inform staff about what this stuff is, to let them know that there are guidelines, and that if they have students, you know, in grades eight or higher, they can use it with their students. But we also wanted to inform staff how to use it for themselves to make their own work more efficient. The theory behind that is if they’re using it, then they’ll be more informed to use it responsibly with their kids. And it’s nowhere near where what it needs to be. I’ll be the first to admit it, but we did something.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> What Westwood did was quite a bit more than most districts. Last fall, a survey found only about one quarter of teachers said their school district had provided any guidance or professional development, about AI. That’s two years after the arrival of the technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Westwood, the faculty learned about ChatGPT pretty early on. Likely before many of their students heard about it. That was NOT true for other schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> The First Time I heard about ChatGPT was in my English Class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes: \u003c/strong>This is Nanki Kaur. She just graduated from American High School, in Fremont, California. And she heard about ChatGPT from another student back in the spring of 2023.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> We were having a conversation about how we were going to approach our research paper assignment that was coming up, and you would have to pick an individual of American significance and prove why they were of American significance and what impact they had. And he was talking about how he just asked this AI platform about how his person of American Significance who was BLEEP, had an impact on America and he got a really strong thesis statement. And he said, I didn’t even have to do anything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Now, I bleeped that last bit so this student won’t get in trouble.But the point here, Nanki says the thesis statement was actually pretty good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> And we were all confused and we were like, what are you talking about? Like how did you not have to do anything and how do you have such a strong thesis statement? ’cause we were just learning how to write a thesis statement at that time. And he said, there’s this online platform, it’s driven by artificial intelligence and it just writes it for you and it’s, it’s really thorough.It’s really good. You guys should try it. And so that was the first time I heard about it and I was shocked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes: \u003c/strong>Nanki talked with our colleague Holly McDede, a reporter based in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Holly McDede:\u003c/strong> Did you try it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> I did go home and try it. Not for the same assignment, but I went home and I looked it up like Chat GPT, OpenAI, what is it? And then I asked it a couple questions like what is the weather like, and if I were to write a story about a certain situation,could you write me a story? And it actually answered all my prompts and it wrote me like a solid paragraph, and so I was shocked. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Nanki says she doesn’t know what the other student did with his thesis statement, but she has a guess:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> I think he did turn it in and I don’t know what kind of disciplinary action he got because there wasn’t really much set in stone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Holly McDede:\u003c/strong> Do you suspect he didn’t get any disciplinary action?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> I do suspect that because he was oddly smug about how well he had done on that assignment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> As far as Nanki knows, that student didn’t get in any trouble. In fact, she’s not sure the teachers knew about ChatGPT at that point. And Nanki says that the school didn’t seem to catch on that students were using ChatGPT to cheat until the fall of 2023, the next school year. A whole year after ChatGPT launched.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Nanki says when they did realize what was happening, the school came down hard. Nanki’s AP English teacher held a special class meeting to present the new academic integrity policy, with a list of sanctions if students were caught using Chat GPT or other AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> Which included, zeros on the assignments or administrative disciplinary action. And if worse comes to worst, then it would be, suspensions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> At American High School Nanki says their policies didn’t just ban ChatGPT. Students were also told they couldn’t use Grammarly, the grammar check program, or similar AI tools that are often built into students’ browsers. But, the policies weren’t applied consistently. Nanki says her social studies teacher actually encouraged her to use AI for research.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> Because she said, I think it’s a really good tool to get all the facts in one spot. Obviously, I’m gonna ask you guys to fact check and cross check, make sure that everything is correct. But I think it’s a really great, you know, tool for you guys to use so that you have everything in one place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Holly McDede:\u003c/strong> Was that confusing for you or other students?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> It was confusing for me, personally because I was like, I just don’t want to use it at all. Like I don’t even care because I don’t need like this habit. I don’t want it on my computer. I don’t want it anywhere, like I just want it like away from me because I didn’t want to jeopardize any chance of having a good grade in that class or in any of my classes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Some 3000 miles away from Nanki, another student had quite a different experience. Woody Goss was wrapping up 8th grade in a public school in the suburbs north of New York city when he spoke to us in the spring of 2024. He says his teachers didn’t really respond to the arrival of ChatGPT. And, that students used AI to get their schoolwork done in almost all of his classes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says his science class was the worst. The students all have laptops, but the teacher sits in front of the class, and can’t see what’s on the screens. Woody sits in the back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody Goss:\u003c/strong> And you can see everybody’s screen and you can see ChatGPT spitting out the text, and you can see them copy and pasting it into their paper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> You could literally see your fellow students using ChatGPT…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody Goss: \u003c/strong> And copying and pasting it, yup.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> If you could estimate how many people in a classroom of 20 students, how many were using it to cheat in the way you’re describing. How many would you say?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody Goss:\u003c/strong> So I’d say that there’s 10 people in that class using it for everything like cheating on, the whole paper is AI, I’d say there’s another 5 that probably half of it’s written by AI, but they do actually read it through and go, “Gee, maybe I don’t wanna include the part that says ‘As a large language model…’” but they like read it through and copy parts and splice bits and do whatever. Then I’d say of, so you’ve got five remaining. I’d say probably 4 of that 5 do the paper legitimately. So there’s 4 people doing it legitimately, and then there’s another one that’s going, and I don’t know, they, it’s kind of a mix, like they plagiarized stuff, but it’s like a paragraph in their entire thing. And I would say, of those 4, I mean, unless you’ve got a really, not a super smart tech kid, I’d say probably all four of those are using AI in some way. It’s just using it appropriately.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes: \u003c/strong>Woody says that some of his teachers were apparently totally oblivious to generative AI. But not his science teacher. She tried to encourage students to use it in a way that would help them learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody Goss:\u003c/strong> That teacher was really trying, she seemed to grasp the concept that there was AI being used, and she was like, we’re gonna learn how to use AI, legitimately and like how do we use it in our research? And everybody heard, oh, you can use AI in your paper. And they all didn’t actually listen to what she was saying. Please use it as like a secondary source. And they all went, “okay, I’m gonna use ChatGPT to write my paper. “\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Um, do you have any teachers who effectively managed this? You know, either in their…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody Goss:\u003c/strong> No, I have the science teacher really tried. She really, she did actually provide, unlike all the other teachers, she actually provided instruction like, Hey, here’s how we’re gonna use it. Everybody ignored it, but she did try, right? All my other teachers just flat out ignored it the whole year. Um, except for the ELA teacher who said, we’re all writing paper benchmarks, which was a nightmare. That was just…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Why, why was that a nightmare?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody Goss:\u003c/strong> Because I’d say for a lot of us, not, not even including AI, we’re all digital people on Chromebooks. We don’t, we don’t know how to write a paper benchmark, which you could argue is its own problem. But then you had a million kids yelling and screaming about that, because god forbid you have to write a paper benchmark. Eww.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> So, according to Woody, his English teacher made the students write things out by hand, which actually did keep people from using ChatGPT. Although Woody thinks that created other problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some people have suggested that Woody doesn’t need to worry. According to him he’s doing his work legitimately. Assuming that’s true, and that the other students are using ChatGPT, then it’ll all come out in the wash. He’ll actually learn what he’s supposed to, and the others won’t, and eventually, that will be obvious, and give him an advantage. Maybe in getting into college, maybe on tests, maybe in life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Woody doesn’t see it that way. In his world. Grades matter. Students are under pressure. When students choose to cheat, that can impact how the teachers teach the material. And the pace of learning, which puts even more pressure on the students who are trying to do the work themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody Goss:\u003c/strong> I mean, it’s frustrating. It’s a compounding effect. I’d say at the beginning of the year, there weren’t a lot of students using AI, and I’d say it’s shifted as the pacing gets faster, then more kids feel like they need it ’cause they feel like they’re gonna fail if they don’t have it. So it piles on itself, and it also, I was never the fast worker in the class. I can do the work, but I’m like dyslexic anyway, so it takes me forever to do the work anyway. I’d say the number of people not using it, like the number of people holding out and being like, “I’m gonna do my work legitimately” is going down because it’s just, there’s no room for, especially in the district where I am, where a lot of, we’re very grade grubby.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s expected, like you gotta have an A in every class. So everybody is, “I gotta get that A, I gotta get this assignment in on time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> All right. I’d like to bring Justin Reich back to the program. Justin has studied technology in schools over the decades, and he can help us make sense of the stories we just heard. Welcome back Justin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Thanks for having me, Jesse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> So the interviews that I shared took place over a year ago, and we’re now coming up on 3 years since ChatGPT was unveiled in November of 2022. So I’m curious what overall reactions you’re having as you listen back to these stories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Well, the first thing it makes me think of is something that we’ve talked about before, which is just this idea of instantaneous arrival is so unusual for an education technology. I mean, the joke we make sometimes is that, you know, “no kid ever dragged their own smart board into a classroom”. Typically education technology was purchased by schools, and that meant the schools could have at least something of a plan before they gave all their teachers online grade books, or they bought all their kids’ Chromebooks, or they bought all their kids’ iPads, or whatever else it is. But there is zero time for planning. There’s zero time for preparation. You know, Steve Ouellette says, “This is urgent”.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s just, there’s something which is happening right now and we need to deal with it. And then schools have really different capacities to deal with that. So an affluent place like Westwood, where they probably have recovered pretty well from the pandemic where things are feeling like they’re back on track, they probably have plenty of resources to hire substitute teachers, you know, the population of kids they serve have all kinds of challenges, but not nearly, the challenges they might encounter in some of their urban neighborhoods nearby or rural neighborhoods out west. They’re in a good place to be able to say, “Oh, we’ve, I’ve got some extra time to be able to manage this. Like, let’s get started.” Let’s, you know, teachers have extra time to be on the working group, “Let’s get started working on this.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For, at other places, many, many schools in November 2022, in the spring of 2023, were still drowning in the challenges of chronic absenteeism of learning, loss of school that felt like it really hadn’t bounced back yet. And so this new thing shows up, and not every school in the country is on the same footing in figuring out how to deal with it. But of course, even if a school doesn’t have an institutional plan to deal with it, every teacher has to deal with it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Ms O’Neill walks into her classroom and all of her students are using Bing. And she goes, well, you know, Bing! Bing is the web browser that you use to download Google Chrome, so you can never have to use Bing again. Why are all my students using Bing on a Chromebook? Like none of this makes sense. And what a great story, to remind us how significantly and quickly things changed and how there was no choice to postpone this. There was no way to say, ah, “ we’ll just buy, maybe we’ll buy the smart boards, but we’ll buy them next year, or we’ll buy them two years after that. Let’s just work on other stuff for now.” You, as an educator, had this in your classroom and had to decide what you were gonna do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Well, speaking of no option to postpone, I wanna play you something that Sam Altman said about all of this back in 2023. You know that Sam Altman was one of the founders of OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT. And he’s the CEO. You may remember he was actually ousted from the company briefly and then reinstated in an episode they’re now calling the blip, and one thing he’s gotten some criticism for is just releasing new versions of ChatGPT out into the world, arguably without a lot of thought about what impact that might have or without a lot of support for institutions like schools that might be impacted by AI. And in 2023, the hosts of the New York Times podcast, Hard Fork asked him about that. And here’s what he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sam Altman:\u003c/strong> You know, one example that I mean is instructive because it was the first and the loudest is what happened with ChatGPT and education. Days, at least weeks. But I think days after the release of ChatGPT school districts were like falling all over themselves to ban ChatGPT. And that didn’t really surprise us, like that we could have predicted and did predict.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The thing that happened after that quickly was, you know, like weeks to months, was school districts and teachers saying, Hey, actually we made a mistake and this is really important part of the future of education and the benefits far outweigh the downside. And not only are we banning it, we’re encouraging our teachers to make use of it in the classroom. We’re encouraging our students to get really good at this tool because it’s gonna be part of the way people live.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, you know, then there was like a big discussion about what, what the kind of path forward should be. And that is just not something that could have happened without releasing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes: \u003c/strong>So Justin, you were paying pretty close attention in 2022 and 2023 when ChatGPT was first unleashed upon schools. Do you think Altman’s account is historically accurate?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Well, I actually got to hear Sam Altman give some version of this because he came to MIT, not long after November, 2022, gave a talk that was facilitated by Sally Kornbluth, our president. And he said something along the lines, I think the question was something like, you know, where are there big wins for ChatGPT? And he was like, well, education’s a slam dunk. This is a place where very obviously, we’re seeing benefits, not really seeing any downsides. Things are just immediately improving society. So this is gonna be a fast win for us. And yeah, you know, it’s, it’s delusional.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not at all connected to what is actually happening in reality in schools. I’m sure some of it is, if I built a technology product, I’d be pretty excited to hear the voices of people who are happy with it. You know, people in powerful places don’t always have great sources of information about what happens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes : \u003c/strong>And, and everything he says has a kind of factual basis to it, but it adds up to a kind of orderly picture of what happens, that to me doesn’t really reflect the chaos that educators were experiencing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Also, if you just know something about schools, this idea that, like, “as soon as it was released they were all doing something”, it’s like, no, that’s not how schools work. And then “really quickly after doing it, they reverse themselves” and you’re like, no, you do not under- like, schools are carrier fleets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Schools are super tankers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Schools are super tankers. Like when they turn, they turn slowly and they turn with inertia. And when they go back it takes a lot of time to move that backwards, but even just in the handful of stories that we heard,we heard from a couple of students, one teacher who said there was nothing happening in their schools. It wasn’t being banned, it wasn’t being encouraged. Teachers were kind of figuring out on their own what to do with it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I mean, if you talk to teachers and students, it’s not very hard to get stories where you get the sense of like, oh, this is not an unambiguously good thing. Like this is making Nanki nervous because pretty clearly students are using this to bypass their learning in ways that they shouldn’t. Woody is really concerned that his classes are moving faster than they’re supposed to because teachers are getting the wrong feedback. From students because students, instead of doing the work and doing the learning and figuring things out, are just copying, pasting questions from ChatGPT into their assignments and this, and Woody is trying to, is telling us he’s trying to do the right thing and this isn’t working here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And even Steve, who’s in like the best possible circumstances, a really experienced, really talented tech director with a really supportive superintendent, really supportive community, cool things happening in their schools. As much good work as he’s doing, I think he still feels like, that he’s just barely taking the first steps that might be needed to get his hands wrapped around this thing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and in fact, I actually played that Sam Altman tape for him and you know, he, and arguably what Sam Altman describes most closely resembles Westwood and Steve Ouellette, like of all the people we heard from, his story is the closest to Sam Altman’s account of what happened. But this, this is what he had to say.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Ouellette: \u003c/strong>Not to highlight Westwood, but when I talk to my peers in neighboring districts, no one’s doing anything. Like they’re just starting to create, think about creating guidelines. And so, we’re kind of just like building the plane, you know, while we fly it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> For the next 6 episodes, we’re going to hear stories of building the plane as we fly it. We’ll hear from the teachers who are struggling to prevent their students from using ChatGPT to bypass learning and thinking; We’ll talk with students about why they turn to AI to get their work done, and what it feels like to be falsely accused of using AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And we’ll hear from teachers, students, and school leaders who have found ways to use AI to help them teach or learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And in our next episode, what even is generative AI? And why does the so-called “jagged frontier” of this technology make it so challenging when it shows up in schools?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It doesn’t think, it doesn’t understand, it predicts one word at a time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes: \u003c/strong>That’s next time on the Homework Machine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This episode was produced by me, Jesse Dukes. We had editing from Ruxandra Guidi and Alexandra Salomon. Reporting and research from Holly McDede, Natasha Esteves, Andrew Meriwether, and Chris Bagg. Sound design and music supervision by Steven Jackson. Production support from Yebu Ji. Data analysis from Manee Ngozi Nnamani and Manasa Kudumu.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Special thanks to Josh Sheldon, Camila Lee, Liz Hutner, and Eric Klopfer. Administrative support from Jessica Rondon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The research and reporting you heard in this episode was supported by the Spencer Foundation, the Kapor Foundation, the Jameel World Education Lab, the Social and Ethical Responsibility of Computing Initiative at MIT, and the RAISE initiative, Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education also at MIT.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, we had support from Google’s Academic Research Awards program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Homework Machine is a production of the Teaching Systems Lab, Justin Reich Director, the lab is located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more commonly known to the world as MIT.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://teachlabpodcast.com/\">teachlabpodcast.com\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://tsl.mit.edu/AI\">tsl.mit.edu/AI\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>That was The Homework Machine from MIT’s Teachlab podcast.\u003cbr>\nYou can find the whole series wherever you get your podcasts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’ll be back next month with a brand new episode of Mindshift.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thanks for listening!\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This month MindShift is sharing an episode from MITs TeachLab podcast. Hosts Jessie Dukes and Justin Reich have interviewed teachers, school leaders and students about how the debut of ChatGPT and Generative AI is actually playing out in schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They’ve compiled their learnings into a mini series called the \u003ca href=\"https://www.teachlabpodcast.com/\">Homework Machine\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC3473844164\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cbr>\nKi Sung:\u003c/strong> Hey MindShift listeners, It’s Ki Sung.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today we’ve got a special episode to share with you. It’s from our friends at Teach Lab, a podcast about the art and craft of teaching.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In their mini series, called The Homework Machine, hosts Jesse Dukes and Justin Reich explore the reactions to AI when it first debuted as a strange new technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’ll let our friends from Teach Lab take it from here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Episode Transcript\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> This is the Teach Lab podcast, I’m Justin Reich.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> And I’m Jesse Dukes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Devon O’Neil is a high school social studies teacher in Oregon. Back in 2021, after six years of teaching, she took 2 years off while her husband attended grad school. At MIT actually. And during her break from teaching, she worked designing classroom curriculum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Devon O’Neil:\u003c/strong> Which is a super cool experience, very different from being in the classroom, and also really reinforced that I wanted to be in the classroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> When she was on her break, O’Neil missed two momentous years for schools. There was a pandemic, remote learning, hybrid learning, returning to school buildings. And when she went back to the classroom, in the fall of 2023, she said, there was some culture shock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Devon O’Neil:\u003c/strong> It was those two, like super crazy post-Covid years. So I come back, and it’s like, like those movies where the caveman, like defrost or whatever. And they’re like “what is this?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> It wasn’t just that her fellow teachers were harrowed and burned out, while she was fresh and energetic. She also noticed that the student work was, well, different from what she remembered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Devon O’Neil:\u003c/strong> I’d have these really well written paragraphs or snippets that are looked to be very well researched and all this, but not at all on topic. Grammar was off. Even the most brilliant 14-year-old still talks like a 14-year-old and still writes like a 14-year-old.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> So, the grammar was oddly good. O’Neil can see her students’ screens, and she sometimes watches them work. And, one day, she noticed they were using an unusual search engine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Devon O’Neil:\u003c/strong> Bing! I was noticing a lot of them were using Bing. To Google stuff, see even to Google stuff. And I was like, that’s the weirdest choice. Who uses Bing?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> And then, one day, she was watching a student complete a writing assignment in a google doc. And poof, a whole well-written paragraph just appeared. Out of nowhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Devon O’Neil:\u003c/strong> Like one minute it’s not there, and one minute it’s there. And, it said like “here are your results”. And they forgot to delete that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> And that’s when Devon realized her students were using ChatGPT to complete in class writing assignments. They would copy and paste the questions she would give them into Bing’s Copilot, which was a free way to use ChatGPT. Then, the students copied the answer, sometimes without any editing, right into their google document.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Devon O’Neil: \u003c/strong>Which is kind of a rookie mistake, like if they’re going to cheat, you want them to cheat a little better.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> We first talked to Devon in 2023, just a few weeks after she figured out what was going on. She says that since then, she’s gotten a lot more savvy about ChatGPT. But her experience speaks to how much can, and did, change in schools, in just a couple of years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> In November of 2022, ChatGPT was launched as a free research preview of advanced generative AI, like a pilot, or beta version. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content, especially text, but also images, videos, and music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ChatGPT is the most famous example of generative AI. There are competitors like Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and the Chinese company, DeepSeek. And rather quickly, students figured out, ChatGPT was pretty good at doing their homework for them. Devon, out of school for two years, working on curriculum, had missed the arrival of the new homework machine. But her students had not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> The arrival of chatGPT, and then fairly quick upgrades with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 within a couple of years, has been the big story in education technology since the fall of 2022.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Waterfall of news stories]\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>News anchor 1: \u003c/strong>So how does it work? Students can drop an assignment into something like ChatGPT, click a button and their homework is done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>News anchor 2: \u003c/strong>She is talking about ChatGPT. School districts like New York cities are banning it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>News anchor 3: \u003c/strong>ChatGPT is the new artificial intelligence tool causing a stir.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Schools have scrambled to figure out what to do about ChatGPT. Ban it? Embrace it? Teachers have scrambled to try to get ahead of the “cheating” problem, and to find ways in which AI can support education. Some Students have scrambled to figure out how to use AI without their teachers detecting it. And education technology companies have scrambled to create AI powered ed tech. And have made many promises about how generative AI will transform education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sal Khan:\u003c/strong> But I think we’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen, and the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> My career has been devoted to studying education technology. Over and over again, we’ve seen new technologies emerge in education, and the technology developers will promise, every time, that the new tech will transform and democratize education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sal Khan :\u003c/strong>That’s what’s about to happen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> And while the technologies do sometimes help teachers and students, those big transformations to schools, they never happen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> But there is something different about Chat GPT and other AI. Throughout history, most education technology has been adopted by schools, who hope it will help them do better work, teaching students. But Generative AI wasn’t invited into schools. Not for the most part. It crashed the party. Even if schools ban it from school laptops, students can often get around that ban, by using Bing, for example. Or they have their own laptop. Or they can access it on their mobile phone, which over 95% of teenagers have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, the kids have access to generative AI. And they’re using it, whether their teachers want them to, or not. That’s having a big impact on schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, a little about me, and this project. I am a journalist, and for the past year and a half, I’ve been working with Justin and other colleagues at MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab. We’ve interviewed over 85 teachers and school leaders, and over 35 students about how all of this is actually playing out in schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve been hearing about why students cheat using AI, what teachers are doing to stop them, and how some teachers and students have found ChatGPT to be helpful for learning. And for the next several weeks, we’re going to share what we’ve learned with you in a mini series we’re calling the Homework Machine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> And now, Jesse, who has immersed himself in this research, will be our host and guide for these episodes. Jesse, you can take it from here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Thanks Justin, but not so fast. We’re going to want your historical knowledge about educational technology to help us unpack and contextualize these stories. So stay close, and keep your mic handy. In fact, we’re going to hear from you again in this episode.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Sounds good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Alright, well, let’s go back to A beginning: December of 2022. We’ll start with Steve Ouellette. He’s a technology director at the Westwood School district, southwest of Boston. His job includes keeping track of computers and software for the district, but also helping teachers think through how to use technology in their work. He remembers the exact moment he heard about generative AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Ouellette:\u003c/strong> So I think it was, it was December 8th. And I was home sick with Covid. I got an email, I’m on a listserv, you know, with all the tech directors in Massachusetts and I got an email that said: Have AI write your next English paper. The sub caption was: Buckle up, here it comes. And someone had basically shared a video of this thing called ChatGPT, that was generating an essay about, I think it was about Raisin in the Sun. And I was like “What is going on here?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes: \u003c/strong>Watching the video, Ouellette says he immediately realized that this was a big deal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Ouellette:\u003c/strong> Yeah, that was, that was a moment. You know, I’ve been in this business since 1993 and I don’t remember having like, a really specific, like, reaction to something the way I did when I saw that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Ouellette emailed the district’s superintendent, and explained the situation to her. There was a new technological tool, available to students, that could do their schoolwork. Pretty effectively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Ouellette:\u003c/strong> And she had no idea what it was. And I explained to her what it was and sent her a link and she shot back to me five minutes later and she’s like, yeah, we need to write about this. And so we, we felt, we both felt this sense of like, urgency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> The superintendent asked Ouellette to write a memo to the district’s teachers. Ouellette is a technology guy, and out of curiosity and excitement, he decided to experiment. Could ChatGPT draft the memo? He asked ChatGPT to write the first draft and sent it to the superintendent. She read it and told Ouellette, this is pretty formal language, it doesn’t sound like you. Make it more casual sounding. But Ouellette didn’t rewrite the memo himself. He prompted ChatGPT to revise the memo. And he told it: “Make it more conversational.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Ouellette:\u003c/strong> I said, you need to write something funny about how, you know France was gonna win the World Cup. And it like, seamlessly incorporated a little like parenthetical thing about, oh by the way, France is gonna win the World Cup. And in the way it did, it was like magnificent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Here’s the memo ChatGPT wrote:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>ChatGPT: \u003c/strong> ChatGPT could also be used to help students learn other languages, such as Spanish or French (which, by the way, I think will win the 2022 World Cup). Imagine being able to have a conversation with ChatGPT in French and receiving instant corrections and feedback on your pronunciation and grammar. The possibilities are truly endless.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Side note, I’m not that impressed with how ChatGPT did with that World Cup joke. It says that “French” will win the world cup, not “France”. But, that aside, they sent the memo out that Monday. Remember, this was December of 2022.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over the next few months, Ouellette formed an AI working group in the district. They brought in a guest speaker. They looked at academic policies. They talked to teachers and students. And by the summer of 2023, they had revised academic integrity guidelines as well as some basic training for teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Ouellette:\u003c/strong> The goal was to inform staff about what this stuff is, to let them know that there are guidelines, and that if they have students, you know, in grades eight or higher, they can use it with their students. But we also wanted to inform staff how to use it for themselves to make their own work more efficient. The theory behind that is if they’re using it, then they’ll be more informed to use it responsibly with their kids. And it’s nowhere near where what it needs to be. I’ll be the first to admit it, but we did something.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> What Westwood did was quite a bit more than most districts. Last fall, a survey found only about one quarter of teachers said their school district had provided any guidance or professional development, about AI. That’s two years after the arrival of the technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Westwood, the faculty learned about ChatGPT pretty early on. Likely before many of their students heard about it. That was NOT true for other schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> The First Time I heard about ChatGPT was in my English Class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes: \u003c/strong>This is Nanki Kaur. She just graduated from American High School, in Fremont, California. And she heard about ChatGPT from another student back in the spring of 2023.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> We were having a conversation about how we were going to approach our research paper assignment that was coming up, and you would have to pick an individual of American significance and prove why they were of American significance and what impact they had. And he was talking about how he just asked this AI platform about how his person of American Significance who was BLEEP, had an impact on America and he got a really strong thesis statement. And he said, I didn’t even have to do anything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Now, I bleeped that last bit so this student won’t get in trouble.But the point here, Nanki says the thesis statement was actually pretty good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> And we were all confused and we were like, what are you talking about? Like how did you not have to do anything and how do you have such a strong thesis statement? ’cause we were just learning how to write a thesis statement at that time. And he said, there’s this online platform, it’s driven by artificial intelligence and it just writes it for you and it’s, it’s really thorough.It’s really good. You guys should try it. And so that was the first time I heard about it and I was shocked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes: \u003c/strong>Nanki talked with our colleague Holly McDede, a reporter based in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Holly McDede:\u003c/strong> Did you try it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> I did go home and try it. Not for the same assignment, but I went home and I looked it up like Chat GPT, OpenAI, what is it? And then I asked it a couple questions like what is the weather like, and if I were to write a story about a certain situation,could you write me a story? And it actually answered all my prompts and it wrote me like a solid paragraph, and so I was shocked. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Nanki says she doesn’t know what the other student did with his thesis statement, but she has a guess:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> I think he did turn it in and I don’t know what kind of disciplinary action he got because there wasn’t really much set in stone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Holly McDede:\u003c/strong> Do you suspect he didn’t get any disciplinary action?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> I do suspect that because he was oddly smug about how well he had done on that assignment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> As far as Nanki knows, that student didn’t get in any trouble. In fact, she’s not sure the teachers knew about ChatGPT at that point. And Nanki says that the school didn’t seem to catch on that students were using ChatGPT to cheat until the fall of 2023, the next school year. A whole year after ChatGPT launched.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Nanki says when they did realize what was happening, the school came down hard. Nanki’s AP English teacher held a special class meeting to present the new academic integrity policy, with a list of sanctions if students were caught using Chat GPT or other AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> Which included, zeros on the assignments or administrative disciplinary action. And if worse comes to worst, then it would be, suspensions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> At American High School Nanki says their policies didn’t just ban ChatGPT. Students were also told they couldn’t use Grammarly, the grammar check program, or similar AI tools that are often built into students’ browsers. But, the policies weren’t applied consistently. Nanki says her social studies teacher actually encouraged her to use AI for research.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> Because she said, I think it’s a really good tool to get all the facts in one spot. Obviously, I’m gonna ask you guys to fact check and cross check, make sure that everything is correct. But I think it’s a really great, you know, tool for you guys to use so that you have everything in one place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Holly McDede:\u003c/strong> Was that confusing for you or other students?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nanki Kaur:\u003c/strong> It was confusing for me, personally because I was like, I just don’t want to use it at all. Like I don’t even care because I don’t need like this habit. I don’t want it on my computer. I don’t want it anywhere, like I just want it like away from me because I didn’t want to jeopardize any chance of having a good grade in that class or in any of my classes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Some 3000 miles away from Nanki, another student had quite a different experience. Woody Goss was wrapping up 8th grade in a public school in the suburbs north of New York city when he spoke to us in the spring of 2024. He says his teachers didn’t really respond to the arrival of ChatGPT. And, that students used AI to get their schoolwork done in almost all of his classes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says his science class was the worst. The students all have laptops, but the teacher sits in front of the class, and can’t see what’s on the screens. Woody sits in the back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody Goss:\u003c/strong> And you can see everybody’s screen and you can see ChatGPT spitting out the text, and you can see them copy and pasting it into their paper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> You could literally see your fellow students using ChatGPT…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody Goss: \u003c/strong> And copying and pasting it, yup.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> If you could estimate how many people in a classroom of 20 students, how many were using it to cheat in the way you’re describing. How many would you say?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody Goss:\u003c/strong> So I’d say that there’s 10 people in that class using it for everything like cheating on, the whole paper is AI, I’d say there’s another 5 that probably half of it’s written by AI, but they do actually read it through and go, “Gee, maybe I don’t wanna include the part that says ‘As a large language model…’” but they like read it through and copy parts and splice bits and do whatever. Then I’d say of, so you’ve got five remaining. I’d say probably 4 of that 5 do the paper legitimately. So there’s 4 people doing it legitimately, and then there’s another one that’s going, and I don’t know, they, it’s kind of a mix, like they plagiarized stuff, but it’s like a paragraph in their entire thing. And I would say, of those 4, I mean, unless you’ve got a really, not a super smart tech kid, I’d say probably all four of those are using AI in some way. It’s just using it appropriately.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes: \u003c/strong>Woody says that some of his teachers were apparently totally oblivious to generative AI. But not his science teacher. She tried to encourage students to use it in a way that would help them learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody Goss:\u003c/strong> That teacher was really trying, she seemed to grasp the concept that there was AI being used, and she was like, we’re gonna learn how to use AI, legitimately and like how do we use it in our research? And everybody heard, oh, you can use AI in your paper. And they all didn’t actually listen to what she was saying. Please use it as like a secondary source. And they all went, “okay, I’m gonna use ChatGPT to write my paper. “\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Um, do you have any teachers who effectively managed this? You know, either in their…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody Goss:\u003c/strong> No, I have the science teacher really tried. She really, she did actually provide, unlike all the other teachers, she actually provided instruction like, Hey, here’s how we’re gonna use it. Everybody ignored it, but she did try, right? All my other teachers just flat out ignored it the whole year. Um, except for the ELA teacher who said, we’re all writing paper benchmarks, which was a nightmare. That was just…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Why, why was that a nightmare?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody Goss:\u003c/strong> Because I’d say for a lot of us, not, not even including AI, we’re all digital people on Chromebooks. We don’t, we don’t know how to write a paper benchmark, which you could argue is its own problem. But then you had a million kids yelling and screaming about that, because god forbid you have to write a paper benchmark. Eww.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> So, according to Woody, his English teacher made the students write things out by hand, which actually did keep people from using ChatGPT. Although Woody thinks that created other problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some people have suggested that Woody doesn’t need to worry. According to him he’s doing his work legitimately. Assuming that’s true, and that the other students are using ChatGPT, then it’ll all come out in the wash. He’ll actually learn what he’s supposed to, and the others won’t, and eventually, that will be obvious, and give him an advantage. Maybe in getting into college, maybe on tests, maybe in life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Woody doesn’t see it that way. In his world. Grades matter. Students are under pressure. When students choose to cheat, that can impact how the teachers teach the material. And the pace of learning, which puts even more pressure on the students who are trying to do the work themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody Goss:\u003c/strong> I mean, it’s frustrating. It’s a compounding effect. I’d say at the beginning of the year, there weren’t a lot of students using AI, and I’d say it’s shifted as the pacing gets faster, then more kids feel like they need it ’cause they feel like they’re gonna fail if they don’t have it. So it piles on itself, and it also, I was never the fast worker in the class. I can do the work, but I’m like dyslexic anyway, so it takes me forever to do the work anyway. I’d say the number of people not using it, like the number of people holding out and being like, “I’m gonna do my work legitimately” is going down because it’s just, there’s no room for, especially in the district where I am, where a lot of, we’re very grade grubby.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s expected, like you gotta have an A in every class. So everybody is, “I gotta get that A, I gotta get this assignment in on time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> All right. I’d like to bring Justin Reich back to the program. Justin has studied technology in schools over the decades, and he can help us make sense of the stories we just heard. Welcome back Justin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Thanks for having me, Jesse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> So the interviews that I shared took place over a year ago, and we’re now coming up on 3 years since ChatGPT was unveiled in November of 2022. So I’m curious what overall reactions you’re having as you listen back to these stories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Well, the first thing it makes me think of is something that we’ve talked about before, which is just this idea of instantaneous arrival is so unusual for an education technology. I mean, the joke we make sometimes is that, you know, “no kid ever dragged their own smart board into a classroom”. Typically education technology was purchased by schools, and that meant the schools could have at least something of a plan before they gave all their teachers online grade books, or they bought all their kids’ Chromebooks, or they bought all their kids’ iPads, or whatever else it is. But there is zero time for planning. There’s zero time for preparation. You know, Steve Ouellette says, “This is urgent”.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s just, there’s something which is happening right now and we need to deal with it. And then schools have really different capacities to deal with that. So an affluent place like Westwood, where they probably have recovered pretty well from the pandemic where things are feeling like they’re back on track, they probably have plenty of resources to hire substitute teachers, you know, the population of kids they serve have all kinds of challenges, but not nearly, the challenges they might encounter in some of their urban neighborhoods nearby or rural neighborhoods out west. They’re in a good place to be able to say, “Oh, we’ve, I’ve got some extra time to be able to manage this. Like, let’s get started.” Let’s, you know, teachers have extra time to be on the working group, “Let’s get started working on this.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For, at other places, many, many schools in November 2022, in the spring of 2023, were still drowning in the challenges of chronic absenteeism of learning, loss of school that felt like it really hadn’t bounced back yet. And so this new thing shows up, and not every school in the country is on the same footing in figuring out how to deal with it. But of course, even if a school doesn’t have an institutional plan to deal with it, every teacher has to deal with it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Ms O’Neill walks into her classroom and all of her students are using Bing. And she goes, well, you know, Bing! Bing is the web browser that you use to download Google Chrome, so you can never have to use Bing again. Why are all my students using Bing on a Chromebook? Like none of this makes sense. And what a great story, to remind us how significantly and quickly things changed and how there was no choice to postpone this. There was no way to say, ah, “ we’ll just buy, maybe we’ll buy the smart boards, but we’ll buy them next year, or we’ll buy them two years after that. Let’s just work on other stuff for now.” You, as an educator, had this in your classroom and had to decide what you were gonna do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Well, speaking of no option to postpone, I wanna play you something that Sam Altman said about all of this back in 2023. You know that Sam Altman was one of the founders of OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT. And he’s the CEO. You may remember he was actually ousted from the company briefly and then reinstated in an episode they’re now calling the blip, and one thing he’s gotten some criticism for is just releasing new versions of ChatGPT out into the world, arguably without a lot of thought about what impact that might have or without a lot of support for institutions like schools that might be impacted by AI. And in 2023, the hosts of the New York Times podcast, Hard Fork asked him about that. And here’s what he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sam Altman:\u003c/strong> You know, one example that I mean is instructive because it was the first and the loudest is what happened with ChatGPT and education. Days, at least weeks. But I think days after the release of ChatGPT school districts were like falling all over themselves to ban ChatGPT. And that didn’t really surprise us, like that we could have predicted and did predict.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The thing that happened after that quickly was, you know, like weeks to months, was school districts and teachers saying, Hey, actually we made a mistake and this is really important part of the future of education and the benefits far outweigh the downside. And not only are we banning it, we’re encouraging our teachers to make use of it in the classroom. We’re encouraging our students to get really good at this tool because it’s gonna be part of the way people live.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, you know, then there was like a big discussion about what, what the kind of path forward should be. And that is just not something that could have happened without releasing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes: \u003c/strong>So Justin, you were paying pretty close attention in 2022 and 2023 when ChatGPT was first unleashed upon schools. Do you think Altman’s account is historically accurate?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Well, I actually got to hear Sam Altman give some version of this because he came to MIT, not long after November, 2022, gave a talk that was facilitated by Sally Kornbluth, our president. And he said something along the lines, I think the question was something like, you know, where are there big wins for ChatGPT? And he was like, well, education’s a slam dunk. This is a place where very obviously, we’re seeing benefits, not really seeing any downsides. Things are just immediately improving society. So this is gonna be a fast win for us. And yeah, you know, it’s, it’s delusional.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not at all connected to what is actually happening in reality in schools. I’m sure some of it is, if I built a technology product, I’d be pretty excited to hear the voices of people who are happy with it. You know, people in powerful places don’t always have great sources of information about what happens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes : \u003c/strong>And, and everything he says has a kind of factual basis to it, but it adds up to a kind of orderly picture of what happens, that to me doesn’t really reflect the chaos that educators were experiencing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Also, if you just know something about schools, this idea that, like, “as soon as it was released they were all doing something”, it’s like, no, that’s not how schools work. And then “really quickly after doing it, they reverse themselves” and you’re like, no, you do not under- like, schools are carrier fleets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Schools are super tankers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Schools are super tankers. Like when they turn, they turn slowly and they turn with inertia. And when they go back it takes a lot of time to move that backwards, but even just in the handful of stories that we heard,we heard from a couple of students, one teacher who said there was nothing happening in their schools. It wasn’t being banned, it wasn’t being encouraged. Teachers were kind of figuring out on their own what to do with it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I mean, if you talk to teachers and students, it’s not very hard to get stories where you get the sense of like, oh, this is not an unambiguously good thing. Like this is making Nanki nervous because pretty clearly students are using this to bypass their learning in ways that they shouldn’t. Woody is really concerned that his classes are moving faster than they’re supposed to because teachers are getting the wrong feedback. From students because students, instead of doing the work and doing the learning and figuring things out, are just copying, pasting questions from ChatGPT into their assignments and this, and Woody is trying to, is telling us he’s trying to do the right thing and this isn’t working here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And even Steve, who’s in like the best possible circumstances, a really experienced, really talented tech director with a really supportive superintendent, really supportive community, cool things happening in their schools. As much good work as he’s doing, I think he still feels like, that he’s just barely taking the first steps that might be needed to get his hands wrapped around this thing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and in fact, I actually played that Sam Altman tape for him and you know, he, and arguably what Sam Altman describes most closely resembles Westwood and Steve Ouellette, like of all the people we heard from, his story is the closest to Sam Altman’s account of what happened. But this, this is what he had to say.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Ouellette: \u003c/strong>Not to highlight Westwood, but when I talk to my peers in neighboring districts, no one’s doing anything. Like they’re just starting to create, think about creating guidelines. And so, we’re kind of just like building the plane, you know, while we fly it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes:\u003c/strong> For the next 6 episodes, we’re going to hear stories of building the plane as we fly it. We’ll hear from the teachers who are struggling to prevent their students from using ChatGPT to bypass learning and thinking; We’ll talk with students about why they turn to AI to get their work done, and what it feels like to be falsely accused of using AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And we’ll hear from teachers, students, and school leaders who have found ways to use AI to help them teach or learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And in our next episode, what even is generative AI? And why does the so-called “jagged frontier” of this technology make it so challenging when it shows up in schools?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It doesn’t think, it doesn’t understand, it predicts one word at a time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jesse Dukes: \u003c/strong>That’s next time on the Homework Machine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This episode was produced by me, Jesse Dukes. We had editing from Ruxandra Guidi and Alexandra Salomon. Reporting and research from Holly McDede, Natasha Esteves, Andrew Meriwether, and Chris Bagg. Sound design and music supervision by Steven Jackson. Production support from Yebu Ji. Data analysis from Manee Ngozi Nnamani and Manasa Kudumu.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Special thanks to Josh Sheldon, Camila Lee, Liz Hutner, and Eric Klopfer. Administrative support from Jessica Rondon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The research and reporting you heard in this episode was supported by the Spencer Foundation, the Kapor Foundation, the Jameel World Education Lab, the Social and Ethical Responsibility of Computing Initiative at MIT, and the RAISE initiative, Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education also at MIT.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, we had support from Google’s Academic Research Awards program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Homework Machine is a production of the Teaching Systems Lab, Justin Reich Director, the lab is located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more commonly known to the world as MIT.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://teachlabpodcast.com/\">teachlabpodcast.com\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://tsl.mit.edu/AI\">tsl.mit.edu/AI\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>That was The Homework Machine from MIT’s Teachlab podcast.\u003cbr>\nYou can find the whole series wherever you get your podcasts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’ll be back next month with a brand new episode of Mindshift.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Anish Mehta, a computer science engineer, grew up in a culture that he said did not address mental health concerns even when he knew he could have benefitted from therapy. So when he was searching for a new edtech business venture, the connection to mental health resources was personal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By 2022, he and his team saw an opportunity to fill the ever-growing \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/55382/investing-in-counselors-isnt-only-about-mental-health-its-good-for-academics-too\">gap between school counselors and students\u003c/a>. According to the American School Counselor Association, school counselors in the U.S., on average, each serve \u003ca href=\"https://www.schoolcounselor.org/getmedia/a988972b-1faa-4b5f-8b9e-a73b5ac44476/ratios-22-23-alpha.pdf#:~:text=The%20American%20School%20Counselor%20Association%20recommends%20a%20ratio%20of%20250%2Dto%2D1.\">385 students at a time\u003c/a>; their \u003ca href=\"https://www.schoolcounselor.org/getmedia/bd376246-0b4f-413f-b3e0-1b9938f36e68/ANM-executive-summary-4th-ed.pdf#:~:text=Research%20shows%20that%20appropriate%20student%2Dto%2Dschool%2Dcounselor%20ratios%20have,of%20school%20counseling%20programs%2C%20go%20to%20www.schoolcounselor.org/effectiveness.\">recommended ratio\u003c/a> is 250:1. And counselors are balancing a number of issues, like college readiness, while managing a s\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64715/youth-mental-health-is-declining-school-based-supports-can-help\">urge of mental health concerns among students\u003c/a>. An AI chatbot would’ve been the sounding board that he and many of his friends would have benefitted from when they were growing up, said Mehta.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At first, they wanted to develop a scripted rules-based chatbot, “and then ChatGPT came out, and like everything changed overnight,” said Mehta.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Alongside was developed by Mehta and others for students in grades four through twelve, with an ambitious goal of solving students’ every day mental health, social and behavioral challenges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When students chat with Kiwi, Alongside’s original chatbot, they are prompted to complete a skill-building exercise when the conversation has concluded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alongside has big plans to break negative cycles before they turn clinical, said Dr. Elsa Friis, a licensed psychologist for the company, whose background includes identifying autism, ADHD and suicide risk using Large Language Models (LLMs).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Alongside app currently partners with more than 200 schools across 19 states, and collects student chat data for their \u003ca href=\"https://www.alongside.care/pages/pdf-2025-youth-mental-health-report?utm_campaign=Youth%20Mental%20Health%20Report%20%2725&utm_source=thirdparty_youthmhreport25&utm_medium=third%20party&utm_content=pdf_youthmhreport&utm_term=pr&eid=\">annual youth mental health report\u003c/a> — not a peer reviewed publication. Their findings this year, said Friis, were surprising. With almost no mention of social media or cyberbullying, the student users reported that their most pressing issues had to do with feeling overwhelmed, poor sleep habits and relationship problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alongside boasts positive and insightful data points in their report and pilot study conducted earlier in 2025, but experts like \u003ca href=\"https://www.rand.org/about/people/m/mcbain_ryan.html\">Ryan McBain\u003c/a>, a health researcher at the RAND Corporation, said that the data isn’t robust enough to understand the real implications of these types of AI mental health tools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you’re going to market a product to millions of children in adolescence throughout the United States through school systems, they need to meet some minimum standard in the context of actual rigorous trials,” said McBain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But underneath all of the report’s data, what does it really mean for students to have 24/7 access to a chatbot that is designed to address their mental health, social, and behavioral concerns?\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>What’s the difference between AI chatbots and AI companions?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>AI companions fall under the larger umbrella of AI chatbots. And while chatbots are becoming more and more sophisticated, AI companions are distinct in the ways that they interact with users. AI companions tend to have less built-in guardrails, meaning they are coded to endlessly adapt to user input; AI chatbots on the other hand might have more guardrails in place to keep a conversation on track or on topic. For example, a troubleshooting chatbot for a food delivery company has specific instructions to carry on conversations that only pertain to food delivery and app issues and isn’t designed to stray from the topic because it doesn’t know how to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the line between AI chatbot and AI companion becomes blurred as more and more people are \u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19218\">using chatbots like ChatGPT as an emotional or therapeutic sounding board\u003c/a>. The people-pleasing features of AI companions can and have become a growing issue of concern, especially when it comes to teens and other vulnerable people who use these companions to, at times, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/19/nx-s1-5545749/ai-chatbots-safety-openai-meta-characterai-teens-suicide\">validate their suicidality\u003c/a>, delusions and unhealthy dependency on these AI companions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A recent \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/talk-trust-and-trade-offs_2025_web.pdf\">report from Common Sense Media\u003c/a> expanded on the harmful effects that AI companion use has on adolescents and teens. According to the report, AI platforms like Character.AI are “designed to simulate humanlike interaction” in the form of “virtual friends, confidants, and even therapists.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although Common Sense Media found that AI companions “pose ‘unacceptable risks’ for users under 18,” young people are still using these platforms at high rates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65898\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2110px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65898\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-AI-Report.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"2110\" height=\"816\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-AI-Report.png 2110w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-AI-Report-2000x773.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-AI-Report-160x62.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-AI-Report-768x297.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-AI-Report-1536x594.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-AI-Report-2048x792.png 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2110px) 100vw, 2110px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From Common Sense Media 2025 report, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/talk-trust-and-trade-offs_2025_web.pdf\">Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions\u003c/a>.”\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Seventy two percent of the 1,060 teens surveyed by Common Sense said that they had used an AI companion before, and 52% of teens surveyed are “regular users” of AI companions. However, for the most part, the report found that the majority of teens value human friendships more than AI companions, don’t share personal information with AI companions and hold some level of skepticism toward AI companions. Thirty nine percent of teens surveyed also said that they apply skills they practiced with AI companions, like expressing emotions, apologizing and standing up for themselves, in real life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When comparing Common Sense Media’s recommendations for safer AI use to Alongside’s chatbot features, they do meet some of these recommendations — like crisis intervention, usage limits and skill-building elements. According to Mehta, there is a big difference between an AI companion and Alongside’s chatbot. Alongside’s chatbot has built-in safety features that require a human to review certain conversations based on trigger words or concerning phrases. And unlike tools like AI companions, Mehta continued, Alongside discourages student users from chatting too much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the biggest challenges that chatbot developers like Alongside face is mitigating people-pleasing tendencies, said Friis, a defining characteristic of AI companions. Guardrails have been put into place by Alongside’s team to avoid people-pleasing, which can turn sinister. “We aren’t going to adapt to foul language, we aren’t going to adapt to bad habits,” said Friis. But it’s up to Alongside’s team to anticipate and determine which language falls into harmful categories including when students try to use the chatbot for cheating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Friis, Alongside errs on the side of caution when it comes to determining what kind of language constitutes a concerning statement. If a chat is flagged, teachers at the partner school are pinged on their phones. In the meantime the student is prompted by Kiwi to complete a crisis assessment and directed to emergency service numbers if needed.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Addressing staffing shortages and resource gaps\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In school settings where the ratio of students to school counselors is often impossibly high, Alongside acts as a triaging tool or liaison between students and their trusted adults, said Friis. For example, a conversation between Kiwi and a student might consist of back-and-forth troubleshooting about creating healthier sleeping habits. The student might be prompted to talk to their parents about making their room darker or adding in a nightlight for a better sleep environment. The student might then come back to their chat after a conversation with their parents and tell Kiwi whether or not that solution worked. If it did, then the conversation concludes, but if it didn’t then Kiwi can suggest other potential solutions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Dr. Friis, a couple of 5-minute back-and-forth conversations with Kiwi, would translate to days if not weeks of conversations with a school counselor who has to prioritize students with the most severe issues and needs like repeated suspensions, suicidality and dropping out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Using digital technologies to triage health issues is not a new idea, said RAND researcher McBain, and pointed to doctor wait rooms that greet patients with a health screener on an iPad.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If a chatbot is a slightly more dynamic user interface for gathering that sort of information, then I think, in theory, that is not an issue,” McBain continued. The unanswered question is whether or not chatbots like Kiwi perform better, as well, or worse than a human would, but the only way to compare the human to the chatbot would be through randomized control trials, said McBain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“One of my biggest fears is that companies are rushing in to try to be the first of their kind,” said McBain, and in the process are lowering safety and quality standards under which these companies and their academic partners circulate optimistic and eye-catching results from their product, he continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there’s mounting pressure on school counselors to meet student needs with limited resources. “It’s really hard to create the space that [school counselors] want to create. Counselors want to have those interactions. It’s the system that’s making it really hard to have them,” said Friis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alongside offers their school partners professional development and consultation services, as well as quarterly summary reports. A lot of the time these services revolve around packaging data for grant proposals or for presenting compelling information to superintendents, said Friis.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A research-backed approach\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>On their website, Alongside touts research-backed methods used to develop their chatbot, and the company has partnered with Dr. Jessica Schleider at Northwestern University, who studies and develops \u003ca href=\"https://www.apa.org/topics/population-health/single-session-interventions\">single-session mental health interventions\u003c/a> (SSI) — mental health interventions designed to address and provide resolution to mental health concerns without the expectation of any follow-up sessions. A typical counseling intervention is at minimum, 12 weeks long, so single-session interventions were appealing to the Alongside team, but “what we know is that no product has ever been able to really effectively do that,” said Friis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, Schleider’s Lab for Scalable Mental Health has published multiple \u003ca href=\"https://www.schleiderlab.org/yes.html\">peer-reviewed trials and clinical research\u003c/a> demonstrating positive results for implementation of SSIs. The Lab for Scalable Mental Health also offers \u003ca href=\"https://www.schleiderlab.org/resources.html\">open source materials\u003c/a> for parents and professionals interested in implementing SSIs for teens and young people, and their initiative Project YES offers free and anonymous online SSIs for youth experiencing mental health concerns.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“One of my biggest fears is that companies are rushing in to try to be the first of their kind,” said McBain, and in the process are lowering safety and quality standards under which these companies and their academic partners circulate optimistic and eye-catching results from their product, he continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>What happens to a kid’s data when using AI for mental health interventions?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Alongside gathers student data from their conversations with the chatbot like mood, hours of sleep, exercise habits, social habits, online interactions, among other things. While this data can offer schools insight into their students’ lives, it does bring up questions about student surveillance and data privacy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65899\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1126px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65899\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-Personal-Information.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1126\" height=\"1428\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-Personal-Information.png 1126w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-Personal-Information-160x203.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-Personal-Information-768x974.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1126px) 100vw, 1126px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From Common Sense Media 2025 report, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/talk-trust-and-trade-offs_2025_web.pdf\">Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions\u003c/a>.”\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Alongside like many other generative AI tools uses other LLM’s APIs — or application programming interface — meaning they include another company’s LLM code, like that used for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, in their chatbot programming which processes chat input and produces chat output. They also have their own in-house LLMs which the Alongside’s AI team has developed over a couple of years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Growing concerns about how user data and personal information is stored is especially pertinent when it comes to sensitive student data. The Alongside team have opted-in to OpenAI’s zero data retention policy, which means that none of the student data is stored by OpenAI or other LLMs that Alongside uses, and none of the data from chats is used for training purposes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because Alongside operates in schools across the U.S., they are FERPA and COPPA compliant, but the data has to be stored somewhere. So, student’s personal identifying information (PII) is uncoupled from their chat data as that information is stored by Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud-based industry standard for private data storage by tech companies around the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alongside uses an encryption process that disaggregates the student PII from their chats. Only when a conversation gets flagged, and needs to be seen by humans for safety reasons, does the student PII connect back to the chat in question. In addition, Alongside is required by law to store student chats and information when it has alerted a crisis, and parents and guardians are free to request that information, said Friis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Typically, parental consent and student data policies are done through the school partners, and as with any school services offered like counseling, there is a parental opt-out option which must adhere to state and district guidelines on parental consent, said Friis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alongside and their school partners put guardrails in place to make sure that student data is kept safe and anonymous. However, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/65868/friendship-romantic-relationship-high-school-students-are-depending-on-ai-in-new-ways\">data breaches\u003c/a> can still happen.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>How the Alongside LLMs are trained\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>One of Alongside’s in-house LLMs is used to identify potential crises in student chats and alert the necessary adults to that crisis, said Mehta. This LLM is trained on student and synthetic outputs and keywords that the Alongside team enters manually. And because language changes often and isn’t always straight forward or easily recognizable, the team keeps an ongoing log of different words and phrases, like the popular abbreviation “KMS” (shorthand for “kill myself”) that they retrain this particular LLM to understand as crisis driven.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although according to Mehta, the process of manually inputting data to train the crisis assessing LLM is one of the biggest efforts that he and his team has to tackle, he doesn’t see a future in which this process could be automated by another AI tool. “I wouldn’t be comfortable automating something that could trigger a crisis [response],” he said — the preference being that the clinical team led by Friis contribute to this process through a clinical lens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But with the potential for rapid growth in Alongside’s number of school partners, these processes will be very difficult to keep up with manually, said Robbie Torney, senior director of AI programs at Common Sense Media. Although Alongside emphasized their process of including human input in both their crisis response and LLM development, “you can’t necessarily scale a system like [this] easily because you’re going to run into the need for more and more human review,” continued Torney.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alongside’s 2024-25 report tracks conflicts in students’ lives, but doesn’t distinguish whether those conflicts are happening online or in person. But according to Friis, it doesn’t really matter where peer-to-peer conflict was taking place. Ultimately, it’s most important to be person-centered, said Dr. Friis, and remain focused on what really matters to each individual student. Alongside does offer proactive skill building lessons on social media safety and digital stewardship.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When it comes to sleep, Kiwi is programmed to ask students about their phone habits “because we know that having your phone at night is one of the main things that’s gonna keep you up,” said Dr. Friis.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Universal mental health screeners available\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Alongside also offers an in-app universal \u003ca href=\"https://www.forensiccounselor.org/images/file/MHSF%20III.pdf\">mental health screener\u003c/a> to school partners. One district in Corsicana, Texas — an old oil town situated outside of Dallas — found the data from the universal mental health screener invaluable. According to Margie Boulware, executive director of special programs for Corsicana Independent School District, the community has had issues with \u003ca href=\"https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/pregnant-teen-in-icu-after-corsicana-double-shooting-police-seek-leads/\">gun violence\u003c/a>, but the district didn’t have a way of surveying their 6,000 students on the mental health effects of traumatic events like these until Alongside was introduced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Boulware, 24% of students surveyed in Corsicana, had a \u003ca href=\"https://www.nami.org/kids-teens-and-young-adults/be-a-trusted-adult-for-young-people-in-your-life/\">trusted adult\u003c/a> in their life, six percentage points fewer than the average in Alongside’s 2024-25 report. “It’s a little shocking how few kids are saying ‘we actually feel connected to an adult,’” said Friis. \u003ca href=\"https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(12)00717-3/fulltext\">According to research\u003c/a>, having a trusted adult helps with young people’s social and emotional health and wellbeing, and can also counter the effects of adverse childhood experiences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a county where the school district is the biggest employer and where 80% of students are economically disadvantaged, mental health resources are bare. Boulware drew a correlation between the uptick in gun violence and the high percentage of students who said that they did not have a trusted adult in their home. And although the data given to the district from Alongside did not directly correlate with the violence that the community had been experiencing, it was the first time that the district was able to take a more comprehensive look at student mental health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So the district formed a task force to tackle these issues of increased gun violence, and decreased mental health and belonging. And for the first time, rather than having to guess how many students were struggling with behavioral issues, Boulware and the task force had representative data to build off of. And without the universal screening survey that Alongside delivered, the district would have stuck to their end of year feedback survey — asking questions like “How was your year?” and “Did you like your teacher?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Boulware believed that the universal screening survey encouraged students to self-reflect and answer questions more truthfully when compared with previous feedback surveys the district had conducted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Boulware, student resources and mental health resources in particular are scarce in Corsicana. But the district does have a team of counselors including 16 academic counselors and six social emotional counselors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With not enough social emotional counselors to go around, Boulware said that a lot of tier one students, or students that don’t require regular one-on-one or group academic or behavioral interventions, fly under their radar. She saw Alongside as an easily accessible tool for students that offers discrete coaching on mental health, social and behavioral issues. And it also offers educators and administrators like herself a glimpse behind the curtain into student mental health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Boulware praised Alongside’s proactive features like gamified skill building for students who struggle with time management or task organization and can earn points and badges for completing certain skills lessons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And Alongside fills an important gap for staff in Corsicana ISD. “The amount of hours that our kiddos are on Alongside…are hours that they’re not waiting outside of a student support counselor office,” which, because of the low ratio of counselors to students, allows for the social emotional counselors to focus on students experiencing a crisis, said Boulware. There is “no way I could have allotted the resources,” that Alongside brings to Corsicana, Boulware added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Alongside app requires 24/7 human monitoring by their school partners. This means that designated educators and admin in each district and school are assigned to receive alerts all hours of the day, any day of the week including during holidays. This feature was a concern for Boulware at first. “If a kiddo’s struggling at three o’clock in the morning and I’m asleep, what does that look like?” she said. Boulware and her team had to hope that an adult sees a crisis alert very quickly, she continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This 24/7 human monitoring system was tested in Corsicana last Christmas break. An alert came in and it took Boulware ten minutes to see it on her phone. By that time, the student had already begun working on an assessment survey prompted by Alongside, the principal who had seen the alert before Boulware had called her, and she had received a text message from the student support council. Boulware was able to contact their local chief of police and address the crisis unfolding. The student was able to connect with a counselor that same afternoon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Anish Mehta, a computer science engineer, grew up in a culture that he said did not address mental health concerns even when he knew he could have benefitted from therapy. So when he was searching for a new edtech business venture, the connection to mental health resources was personal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By 2022, he and his team saw an opportunity to fill the ever-growing \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/55382/investing-in-counselors-isnt-only-about-mental-health-its-good-for-academics-too\">gap between school counselors and students\u003c/a>. According to the American School Counselor Association, school counselors in the U.S., on average, each serve \u003ca href=\"https://www.schoolcounselor.org/getmedia/a988972b-1faa-4b5f-8b9e-a73b5ac44476/ratios-22-23-alpha.pdf#:~:text=The%20American%20School%20Counselor%20Association%20recommends%20a%20ratio%20of%20250%2Dto%2D1.\">385 students at a time\u003c/a>; their \u003ca href=\"https://www.schoolcounselor.org/getmedia/bd376246-0b4f-413f-b3e0-1b9938f36e68/ANM-executive-summary-4th-ed.pdf#:~:text=Research%20shows%20that%20appropriate%20student%2Dto%2Dschool%2Dcounselor%20ratios%20have,of%20school%20counseling%20programs%2C%20go%20to%20www.schoolcounselor.org/effectiveness.\">recommended ratio\u003c/a> is 250:1. And counselors are balancing a number of issues, like college readiness, while managing a s\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64715/youth-mental-health-is-declining-school-based-supports-can-help\">urge of mental health concerns among students\u003c/a>. An AI chatbot would’ve been the sounding board that he and many of his friends would have benefitted from when they were growing up, said Mehta.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At first, they wanted to develop a scripted rules-based chatbot, “and then ChatGPT came out, and like everything changed overnight,” said Mehta.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Alongside was developed by Mehta and others for students in grades four through twelve, with an ambitious goal of solving students’ every day mental health, social and behavioral challenges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When students chat with Kiwi, Alongside’s original chatbot, they are prompted to complete a skill-building exercise when the conversation has concluded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alongside has big plans to break negative cycles before they turn clinical, said Dr. Elsa Friis, a licensed psychologist for the company, whose background includes identifying autism, ADHD and suicide risk using Large Language Models (LLMs).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Alongside app currently partners with more than 200 schools across 19 states, and collects student chat data for their \u003ca href=\"https://www.alongside.care/pages/pdf-2025-youth-mental-health-report?utm_campaign=Youth%20Mental%20Health%20Report%20%2725&utm_source=thirdparty_youthmhreport25&utm_medium=third%20party&utm_content=pdf_youthmhreport&utm_term=pr&eid=\">annual youth mental health report\u003c/a> — not a peer reviewed publication. Their findings this year, said Friis, were surprising. With almost no mention of social media or cyberbullying, the student users reported that their most pressing issues had to do with feeling overwhelmed, poor sleep habits and relationship problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alongside boasts positive and insightful data points in their report and pilot study conducted earlier in 2025, but experts like \u003ca href=\"https://www.rand.org/about/people/m/mcbain_ryan.html\">Ryan McBain\u003c/a>, a health researcher at the RAND Corporation, said that the data isn’t robust enough to understand the real implications of these types of AI mental health tools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you’re going to market a product to millions of children in adolescence throughout the United States through school systems, they need to meet some minimum standard in the context of actual rigorous trials,” said McBain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But underneath all of the report’s data, what does it really mean for students to have 24/7 access to a chatbot that is designed to address their mental health, social, and behavioral concerns?\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>What’s the difference between AI chatbots and AI companions?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>AI companions fall under the larger umbrella of AI chatbots. And while chatbots are becoming more and more sophisticated, AI companions are distinct in the ways that they interact with users. AI companions tend to have less built-in guardrails, meaning they are coded to endlessly adapt to user input; AI chatbots on the other hand might have more guardrails in place to keep a conversation on track or on topic. For example, a troubleshooting chatbot for a food delivery company has specific instructions to carry on conversations that only pertain to food delivery and app issues and isn’t designed to stray from the topic because it doesn’t know how to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the line between AI chatbot and AI companion becomes blurred as more and more people are \u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19218\">using chatbots like ChatGPT as an emotional or therapeutic sounding board\u003c/a>. The people-pleasing features of AI companions can and have become a growing issue of concern, especially when it comes to teens and other vulnerable people who use these companions to, at times, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/19/nx-s1-5545749/ai-chatbots-safety-openai-meta-characterai-teens-suicide\">validate their suicidality\u003c/a>, delusions and unhealthy dependency on these AI companions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A recent \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/talk-trust-and-trade-offs_2025_web.pdf\">report from Common Sense Media\u003c/a> expanded on the harmful effects that AI companion use has on adolescents and teens. According to the report, AI platforms like Character.AI are “designed to simulate humanlike interaction” in the form of “virtual friends, confidants, and even therapists.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although Common Sense Media found that AI companions “pose ‘unacceptable risks’ for users under 18,” young people are still using these platforms at high rates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65898\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2110px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65898\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-AI-Report.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"2110\" height=\"816\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-AI-Report.png 2110w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-AI-Report-2000x773.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-AI-Report-160x62.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-AI-Report-768x297.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-AI-Report-1536x594.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-AI-Report-2048x792.png 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2110px) 100vw, 2110px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From Common Sense Media 2025 report, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/talk-trust-and-trade-offs_2025_web.pdf\">Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions\u003c/a>.”\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Seventy two percent of the 1,060 teens surveyed by Common Sense said that they had used an AI companion before, and 52% of teens surveyed are “regular users” of AI companions. However, for the most part, the report found that the majority of teens value human friendships more than AI companions, don’t share personal information with AI companions and hold some level of skepticism toward AI companions. Thirty nine percent of teens surveyed also said that they apply skills they practiced with AI companions, like expressing emotions, apologizing and standing up for themselves, in real life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When comparing Common Sense Media’s recommendations for safer AI use to Alongside’s chatbot features, they do meet some of these recommendations — like crisis intervention, usage limits and skill-building elements. According to Mehta, there is a big difference between an AI companion and Alongside’s chatbot. Alongside’s chatbot has built-in safety features that require a human to review certain conversations based on trigger words or concerning phrases. And unlike tools like AI companions, Mehta continued, Alongside discourages student users from chatting too much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the biggest challenges that chatbot developers like Alongside face is mitigating people-pleasing tendencies, said Friis, a defining characteristic of AI companions. Guardrails have been put into place by Alongside’s team to avoid people-pleasing, which can turn sinister. “We aren’t going to adapt to foul language, we aren’t going to adapt to bad habits,” said Friis. But it’s up to Alongside’s team to anticipate and determine which language falls into harmful categories including when students try to use the chatbot for cheating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Friis, Alongside errs on the side of caution when it comes to determining what kind of language constitutes a concerning statement. If a chat is flagged, teachers at the partner school are pinged on their phones. In the meantime the student is prompted by Kiwi to complete a crisis assessment and directed to emergency service numbers if needed.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Addressing staffing shortages and resource gaps\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In school settings where the ratio of students to school counselors is often impossibly high, Alongside acts as a triaging tool or liaison between students and their trusted adults, said Friis. For example, a conversation between Kiwi and a student might consist of back-and-forth troubleshooting about creating healthier sleeping habits. The student might be prompted to talk to their parents about making their room darker or adding in a nightlight for a better sleep environment. The student might then come back to their chat after a conversation with their parents and tell Kiwi whether or not that solution worked. If it did, then the conversation concludes, but if it didn’t then Kiwi can suggest other potential solutions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Dr. Friis, a couple of 5-minute back-and-forth conversations with Kiwi, would translate to days if not weeks of conversations with a school counselor who has to prioritize students with the most severe issues and needs like repeated suspensions, suicidality and dropping out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Using digital technologies to triage health issues is not a new idea, said RAND researcher McBain, and pointed to doctor wait rooms that greet patients with a health screener on an iPad.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If a chatbot is a slightly more dynamic user interface for gathering that sort of information, then I think, in theory, that is not an issue,” McBain continued. The unanswered question is whether or not chatbots like Kiwi perform better, as well, or worse than a human would, but the only way to compare the human to the chatbot would be through randomized control trials, said McBain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“One of my biggest fears is that companies are rushing in to try to be the first of their kind,” said McBain, and in the process are lowering safety and quality standards under which these companies and their academic partners circulate optimistic and eye-catching results from their product, he continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there’s mounting pressure on school counselors to meet student needs with limited resources. “It’s really hard to create the space that [school counselors] want to create. Counselors want to have those interactions. It’s the system that’s making it really hard to have them,” said Friis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alongside offers their school partners professional development and consultation services, as well as quarterly summary reports. A lot of the time these services revolve around packaging data for grant proposals or for presenting compelling information to superintendents, said Friis.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A research-backed approach\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>On their website, Alongside touts research-backed methods used to develop their chatbot, and the company has partnered with Dr. Jessica Schleider at Northwestern University, who studies and develops \u003ca href=\"https://www.apa.org/topics/population-health/single-session-interventions\">single-session mental health interventions\u003c/a> (SSI) — mental health interventions designed to address and provide resolution to mental health concerns without the expectation of any follow-up sessions. A typical counseling intervention is at minimum, 12 weeks long, so single-session interventions were appealing to the Alongside team, but “what we know is that no product has ever been able to really effectively do that,” said Friis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, Schleider’s Lab for Scalable Mental Health has published multiple \u003ca href=\"https://www.schleiderlab.org/yes.html\">peer-reviewed trials and clinical research\u003c/a> demonstrating positive results for implementation of SSIs. The Lab for Scalable Mental Health also offers \u003ca href=\"https://www.schleiderlab.org/resources.html\">open source materials\u003c/a> for parents and professionals interested in implementing SSIs for teens and young people, and their initiative Project YES offers free and anonymous online SSIs for youth experiencing mental health concerns.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“One of my biggest fears is that companies are rushing in to try to be the first of their kind,” said McBain, and in the process are lowering safety and quality standards under which these companies and their academic partners circulate optimistic and eye-catching results from their product, he continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>What happens to a kid’s data when using AI for mental health interventions?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Alongside gathers student data from their conversations with the chatbot like mood, hours of sleep, exercise habits, social habits, online interactions, among other things. While this data can offer schools insight into their students’ lives, it does bring up questions about student surveillance and data privacy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65899\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1126px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65899\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-Personal-Information.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1126\" height=\"1428\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-Personal-Information.png 1126w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-Personal-Information-160x203.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Common-Sense-Media-Personal-Information-768x974.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1126px) 100vw, 1126px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From Common Sense Media 2025 report, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/talk-trust-and-trade-offs_2025_web.pdf\">Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions\u003c/a>.”\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Alongside like many other generative AI tools uses other LLM’s APIs — or application programming interface — meaning they include another company’s LLM code, like that used for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, in their chatbot programming which processes chat input and produces chat output. They also have their own in-house LLMs which the Alongside’s AI team has developed over a couple of years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Growing concerns about how user data and personal information is stored is especially pertinent when it comes to sensitive student data. The Alongside team have opted-in to OpenAI’s zero data retention policy, which means that none of the student data is stored by OpenAI or other LLMs that Alongside uses, and none of the data from chats is used for training purposes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because Alongside operates in schools across the U.S., they are FERPA and COPPA compliant, but the data has to be stored somewhere. So, student’s personal identifying information (PII) is uncoupled from their chat data as that information is stored by Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud-based industry standard for private data storage by tech companies around the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alongside uses an encryption process that disaggregates the student PII from their chats. Only when a conversation gets flagged, and needs to be seen by humans for safety reasons, does the student PII connect back to the chat in question. In addition, Alongside is required by law to store student chats and information when it has alerted a crisis, and parents and guardians are free to request that information, said Friis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Typically, parental consent and student data policies are done through the school partners, and as with any school services offered like counseling, there is a parental opt-out option which must adhere to state and district guidelines on parental consent, said Friis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alongside and their school partners put guardrails in place to make sure that student data is kept safe and anonymous. However, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/65868/friendship-romantic-relationship-high-school-students-are-depending-on-ai-in-new-ways\">data breaches\u003c/a> can still happen.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>How the Alongside LLMs are trained\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>One of Alongside’s in-house LLMs is used to identify potential crises in student chats and alert the necessary adults to that crisis, said Mehta. This LLM is trained on student and synthetic outputs and keywords that the Alongside team enters manually. And because language changes often and isn’t always straight forward or easily recognizable, the team keeps an ongoing log of different words and phrases, like the popular abbreviation “KMS” (shorthand for “kill myself”) that they retrain this particular LLM to understand as crisis driven.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although according to Mehta, the process of manually inputting data to train the crisis assessing LLM is one of the biggest efforts that he and his team has to tackle, he doesn’t see a future in which this process could be automated by another AI tool. “I wouldn’t be comfortable automating something that could trigger a crisis [response],” he said — the preference being that the clinical team led by Friis contribute to this process through a clinical lens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But with the potential for rapid growth in Alongside’s number of school partners, these processes will be very difficult to keep up with manually, said Robbie Torney, senior director of AI programs at Common Sense Media. Although Alongside emphasized their process of including human input in both their crisis response and LLM development, “you can’t necessarily scale a system like [this] easily because you’re going to run into the need for more and more human review,” continued Torney.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alongside’s 2024-25 report tracks conflicts in students’ lives, but doesn’t distinguish whether those conflicts are happening online or in person. But according to Friis, it doesn’t really matter where peer-to-peer conflict was taking place. Ultimately, it’s most important to be person-centered, said Dr. Friis, and remain focused on what really matters to each individual student. Alongside does offer proactive skill building lessons on social media safety and digital stewardship.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When it comes to sleep, Kiwi is programmed to ask students about their phone habits “because we know that having your phone at night is one of the main things that’s gonna keep you up,” said Dr. Friis.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Universal mental health screeners available\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Alongside also offers an in-app universal \u003ca href=\"https://www.forensiccounselor.org/images/file/MHSF%20III.pdf\">mental health screener\u003c/a> to school partners. One district in Corsicana, Texas — an old oil town situated outside of Dallas — found the data from the universal mental health screener invaluable. According to Margie Boulware, executive director of special programs for Corsicana Independent School District, the community has had issues with \u003ca href=\"https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/pregnant-teen-in-icu-after-corsicana-double-shooting-police-seek-leads/\">gun violence\u003c/a>, but the district didn’t have a way of surveying their 6,000 students on the mental health effects of traumatic events like these until Alongside was introduced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Boulware, 24% of students surveyed in Corsicana, had a \u003ca href=\"https://www.nami.org/kids-teens-and-young-adults/be-a-trusted-adult-for-young-people-in-your-life/\">trusted adult\u003c/a> in their life, six percentage points fewer than the average in Alongside’s 2024-25 report. “It’s a little shocking how few kids are saying ‘we actually feel connected to an adult,’” said Friis. \u003ca href=\"https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(12)00717-3/fulltext\">According to research\u003c/a>, having a trusted adult helps with young people’s social and emotional health and wellbeing, and can also counter the effects of adverse childhood experiences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a county where the school district is the biggest employer and where 80% of students are economically disadvantaged, mental health resources are bare. Boulware drew a correlation between the uptick in gun violence and the high percentage of students who said that they did not have a trusted adult in their home. And although the data given to the district from Alongside did not directly correlate with the violence that the community had been experiencing, it was the first time that the district was able to take a more comprehensive look at student mental health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So the district formed a task force to tackle these issues of increased gun violence, and decreased mental health and belonging. And for the first time, rather than having to guess how many students were struggling with behavioral issues, Boulware and the task force had representative data to build off of. And without the universal screening survey that Alongside delivered, the district would have stuck to their end of year feedback survey — asking questions like “How was your year?” and “Did you like your teacher?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Boulware believed that the universal screening survey encouraged students to self-reflect and answer questions more truthfully when compared with previous feedback surveys the district had conducted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Boulware, student resources and mental health resources in particular are scarce in Corsicana. But the district does have a team of counselors including 16 academic counselors and six social emotional counselors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With not enough social emotional counselors to go around, Boulware said that a lot of tier one students, or students that don’t require regular one-on-one or group academic or behavioral interventions, fly under their radar. She saw Alongside as an easily accessible tool for students that offers discrete coaching on mental health, social and behavioral issues. And it also offers educators and administrators like herself a glimpse behind the curtain into student mental health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Boulware praised Alongside’s proactive features like gamified skill building for students who struggle with time management or task organization and can earn points and badges for completing certain skills lessons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And Alongside fills an important gap for staff in Corsicana ISD. “The amount of hours that our kiddos are on Alongside…are hours that they’re not waiting outside of a student support counselor office,” which, because of the low ratio of counselors to students, allows for the social emotional counselors to focus on students experiencing a crisis, said Boulware. There is “no way I could have allotted the resources,” that Alongside brings to Corsicana, Boulware added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Alongside app requires 24/7 human monitoring by their school partners. This means that designated educators and admin in each district and school are assigned to receive alerts all hours of the day, any day of the week including during holidays. This feature was a concern for Boulware at first. “If a kiddo’s struggling at three o’clock in the morning and I’m asleep, what does that look like?” she said. Boulware and her team had to hope that an adult sees a crisis alert very quickly, she continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This 24/7 human monitoring system was tested in Corsicana last Christmas break. An alert came in and it took Boulware ten minutes to see it on her phone. By that time, the student had already begun working on an assessment survey prompted by Alongside, the principal who had seen the alert before Boulware had called her, and she had received a text message from the student support council. Boulware was able to contact their local chief of police and address the crisis unfolding. The student was able to connect with a counselor that same afternoon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Friendship? Romantic Relationship? High School Students Are Depending on AI in New Ways",
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"headTitle": "Friendship? Romantic Relationship? High School Students Are Depending on AI in New Ways | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>New survey data finds that nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers say they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with artificial intelligence. And 42% of students surveyed say they or someone they know have used AI for companionship.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s according to \u003ca href=\"https://cdt.org/insights/hand-in-hand-schools-embrace-of-ai-connected-to-increased-risks-to-students/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">new research\u003c/a> from the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights, civil liberties and responsible use of data and technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CDT conducted national surveys of roughly 800 sixth through 12th grade public school teachers, 1,000 ninth through 12th grade students and 1,000 parents. The vast majority — 86% of students, 85% of educators and 75% of parents — say they used AI during the last school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CDT’s Elizabeth Laird, one of the authors of the report, says the surveys showed some strong correlations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among them: “The more ways that a student reports that their school uses AI, the more likely they are to report things like ‘I know someone who considers AI to be a friend,’ ‘I know someone who considers AI to be a romantic partner.'”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Data breaches, deepfakes and damaged trust\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Laird says the surveys found higher levels of AI use in schools — defined as seven to 10 school-related uses for teachers, and four to six for students — correlates with increased exposure to data breaches, troubling interactions between students and AI and AI-generated deepfakes, or manipulated videos or photos that can be used to sexually harass and bully students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This technology is a new vector for sexual harassment and bullying, which were long-standing issues [before widespread use of AI],” Laird says, “and this has become a new way to exacerbate that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to the report, 28% of teachers who use AI for many school-related tasks say their school experienced a large-scale data breach, compared to 18% of teachers who don’t use AI or use it for only a few tasks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laird, who previously worked as a data privacy officer for D.C.’s state education agency, says she believes the more data schools share with AI systems, the more they risk a data breach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“AI systems take a lot of data, they also spit out a lot of information too,” she says. “That is contributing to that connection.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers with higher levels of school-related AI use were also more likely to report that an AI system they were using in class failed to work as intended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These teachers were also more likely to report that the use of AI damaged community trust in schools. For example, Laird says schools frequently use AI-powered software to monitor activity on school-issued devices, in some cases leading to false alarms and even \u003ca href=\"https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/best-of-the-week/honorable-mention/2025/students-have-been-called-to-the-office-and-even-arrested-for-ai-surveillance-false-alarms/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">student arrests\u003c/a>. She says this is especially concerning for students who can’t afford their own personal computers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So if you are someone who has a personal device and doesn’t have to use a school-issued device, you can essentially afford to keep your documents and messages private,” Laird says.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Risks to student wellbeing\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Students who attend schools that use AI a lot were also more likely to report that they or a friend had used AI for mental health support, as a companion, as a way to escape reality and to have a romantic relationship.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When students reported having conversations with AI systems for personal reasons, and not for school work, 31% said they used a device or software provided by their school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think students should know that they are not actually talking to a person. They are talking to a tool, and those tools have known limitations,” Laird says. “Our research suggests that the AI literacy and the training that students are getting are very basic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laird says students and educators often aren’t getting training or guidance to help them navigate the more complex challenges associated with the technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, only 11% of surveyed teachers said they received training on how to respond if they suspect a student’s use of AI is detrimental to their wellbeing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Educators who frequently use AI were more likely to say the technology improves their teaching, saves them time and provides individualized learning for students – but students in schools where AI use is prevalent reported higher levels of concern about the technology, including that it makes them feel less connected to their teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we hear from students is that while there may be value in this, there’s also some negative consequences that are coming with it, too,” Laird says. “And if we’re going to realize the benefits of AI, you know, we really need to pay attention to what students are telling us.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "A national survey of students, teachers and parents shines a light on how the AI revolution is playing out in schools – including when it comes to bullying and a community's trust in schools.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>New survey data finds that nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers say they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with artificial intelligence. And 42% of students surveyed say they or someone they know have used AI for companionship.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s according to \u003ca href=\"https://cdt.org/insights/hand-in-hand-schools-embrace-of-ai-connected-to-increased-risks-to-students/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">new research\u003c/a> from the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights, civil liberties and responsible use of data and technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CDT conducted national surveys of roughly 800 sixth through 12th grade public school teachers, 1,000 ninth through 12th grade students and 1,000 parents. The vast majority — 86% of students, 85% of educators and 75% of parents — say they used AI during the last school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CDT’s Elizabeth Laird, one of the authors of the report, says the surveys showed some strong correlations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among them: “The more ways that a student reports that their school uses AI, the more likely they are to report things like ‘I know someone who considers AI to be a friend,’ ‘I know someone who considers AI to be a romantic partner.'”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Data breaches, deepfakes and damaged trust\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Laird says the surveys found higher levels of AI use in schools — defined as seven to 10 school-related uses for teachers, and four to six for students — correlates with increased exposure to data breaches, troubling interactions between students and AI and AI-generated deepfakes, or manipulated videos or photos that can be used to sexually harass and bully students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This technology is a new vector for sexual harassment and bullying, which were long-standing issues [before widespread use of AI],” Laird says, “and this has become a new way to exacerbate that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to the report, 28% of teachers who use AI for many school-related tasks say their school experienced a large-scale data breach, compared to 18% of teachers who don’t use AI or use it for only a few tasks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laird, who previously worked as a data privacy officer for D.C.’s state education agency, says she believes the more data schools share with AI systems, the more they risk a data breach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“AI systems take a lot of data, they also spit out a lot of information too,” she says. “That is contributing to that connection.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers with higher levels of school-related AI use were also more likely to report that an AI system they were using in class failed to work as intended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These teachers were also more likely to report that the use of AI damaged community trust in schools. For example, Laird says schools frequently use AI-powered software to monitor activity on school-issued devices, in some cases leading to false alarms and even \u003ca href=\"https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/best-of-the-week/honorable-mention/2025/students-have-been-called-to-the-office-and-even-arrested-for-ai-surveillance-false-alarms/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">student arrests\u003c/a>. She says this is especially concerning for students who can’t afford their own personal computers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So if you are someone who has a personal device and doesn’t have to use a school-issued device, you can essentially afford to keep your documents and messages private,” Laird says.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Risks to student wellbeing\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Students who attend schools that use AI a lot were also more likely to report that they or a friend had used AI for mental health support, as a companion, as a way to escape reality and to have a romantic relationship.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When students reported having conversations with AI systems for personal reasons, and not for school work, 31% said they used a device or software provided by their school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think students should know that they are not actually talking to a person. They are talking to a tool, and those tools have known limitations,” Laird says. “Our research suggests that the AI literacy and the training that students are getting are very basic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laird says students and educators often aren’t getting training or guidance to help them navigate the more complex challenges associated with the technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, only 11% of surveyed teachers said they received training on how to respond if they suspect a student’s use of AI is detrimental to their wellbeing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Educators who frequently use AI were more likely to say the technology improves their teaching, saves them time and provides individualized learning for students – but students in schools where AI use is prevalent reported higher levels of concern about the technology, including that it makes them feel less connected to their teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we hear from students is that while there may be value in this, there’s also some negative consequences that are coming with it, too,” Laird says. “And if we’re going to realize the benefits of AI, you know, we really need to pay attention to what students are telling us.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>When Georgia State University professor G. Sue Kasun taught a new course this summer, she used generative artificial intelligence to help her brainstorm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kasun, a professor of language, culture and education, teaches current and future language educators. And she used Gemini — Google’s generative AI chatbot — to come up with ideas for readings and activities for a course on integrating identity and culture in language education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There were suggestions of offering different choices like having students generate an image, having students write a poem. And these are things that I could maybe think of but we have limits on our time, which is probably our most valuable resource as faculty.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kasun also uses Gemini to create grading rubrics. She says she always checks to make sure that what it generates is accurate “and importantly representative of what my learning objectives are.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a massive time-saver, she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kasun is one of an increasing number of higher education faculty using generative AI models in their work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One \u003ca href=\"https://tytonpartners.com/time-for-class-2025/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">national survey\u003c/a> of more than 1,800 higher education staff members conducted by consulting firm Tyton Partners earlier this year found that about 40% of administrators and 30% of instructions use generative AI daily or weekly — that’s up from just 2% and 4%, respectively, in the spring of 2023.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-how-educators-use-claude\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New research\u003c/a> from Anthropic — the company behind the AI chatbot Claude — suggests professors around the world are using AI for curriculum development, designing lessons, conducting research, writing grant proposals, managing budgets, grading student work and designing their own interactive learning tools, among other uses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When we looked into the data late last year, we saw that of all the ways people were using Claude, education made up two out of the top four use cases,” says Drew Bent, education lead at Anthropic and one of the researchers who led the study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That includes both students and professors. Bent says those findings inspired a report on \u003ca href=\"https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-how-university-students-use-claude\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">how university students use the AI chatbot\u003c/a> and the most recent research on professor use of Claude.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>How professors are using AI \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Anthropic’s report is based on roughly 74,000 conversations that users with higher education email addresses had with Claude over an 11-day period in late May and early June of this year. The company used an automated tool to analyze the conversations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The majority — or 57% of the conversations analyzed — related to curriculum development, like designing lesson plans and assignments. Bent says one of the more surprising findings was professors using Claude to develop interactive simulations for students, like web-based games.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s helping write the code so that you can have an interactive simulation that you as an educator can share with students in your class for them to help understand a concept,” Bent says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second most common way professors used Claude was for academic research — this comprised 13% of conversations. Educators also used the AI chatbot to complete administrative tasks, including budget plans, drafting letters of recommendation and creating meeting agendas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Their analysis suggests professors tend to automate more tedious and routine work, including financial and administrative tasks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But for other areas like teaching and lesson design, it was much more of a collaborative process, where the educators and the AI assistant are going back and forth and collaborating on it together,” Bent says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The data comes with caveats – Anthropic \u003ca href=\"https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-how-educators-use-claude\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">published its findings\u003c/a> but did not release the full data behind them – including how many professors were in the analysis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the research captured a snapshot in time; the period studied encompassed the tail end of the academic year. Had they analyzed an 11-day period in October, Bent says, for example, the results could have been different.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Grading student work with AI\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>About 7% of the conversations Anthropic analyzed were about grading student work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When educators use AI for grading, they often automate a lot of it away, and they have AI do significant parts of the grading,” Bent says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company partnered with Northeastern University on this research – surveying 22 faculty members about how and why they use Claude. In their survey responses, university faculty said grading student work was the task the chatbot was least effective at.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not clear whether any of the assessments Claude produced actually factored into the grades and feedback students received.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nevertheless, Marc Watkins, a lecturer and researcher at the University of Mississippi, fears that Anthropic’s findings signal a disturbing trend. Watkins studies the impact of AI on higher education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This sort of nightmare scenario that we might be running into is students using AI to write papers and teachers using AI to grade the same papers. If that’s the case, then what’s the purpose of education?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Watkins says he’s also alarmed by the use of AI in ways that he says, devalue professor-student relationships.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you’re just using this to automate some portion of your life, whether that’s writing emails to students, letters of recommendation, grading or providing feedback, I’m really against that,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Professors and faculty need guidance \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Kasun — the professor from Georgia State — also doesn’t believe professors should use AI for grading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She wishes colleges and universities had more support and guidance on how best to use this new technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are here, sort of alone in the forest, fending for ourselves,” Kasun says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Drew Bent, with Anthropic, says \u003ca href=\"https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-higher-education-initiatives\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">companies like his should partner\u003c/a> with higher education institutions. He cautions: “Us as a tech company, telling educators what to do or what not to do is not the right way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But educators and those working in AI, like Bent, agree that the decisions made now over how to incorporate AI in college and university courses will impact students for years to come.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>When Georgia State University professor G. Sue Kasun taught a new course this summer, she used generative artificial intelligence to help her brainstorm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kasun, a professor of language, culture and education, teaches current and future language educators. And she used Gemini — Google’s generative AI chatbot — to come up with ideas for readings and activities for a course on integrating identity and culture in language education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There were suggestions of offering different choices like having students generate an image, having students write a poem. And these are things that I could maybe think of but we have limits on our time, which is probably our most valuable resource as faculty.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kasun also uses Gemini to create grading rubrics. She says she always checks to make sure that what it generates is accurate “and importantly representative of what my learning objectives are.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a massive time-saver, she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kasun is one of an increasing number of higher education faculty using generative AI models in their work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One \u003ca href=\"https://tytonpartners.com/time-for-class-2025/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">national survey\u003c/a> of more than 1,800 higher education staff members conducted by consulting firm Tyton Partners earlier this year found that about 40% of administrators and 30% of instructions use generative AI daily or weekly — that’s up from just 2% and 4%, respectively, in the spring of 2023.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-how-educators-use-claude\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New research\u003c/a> from Anthropic — the company behind the AI chatbot Claude — suggests professors around the world are using AI for curriculum development, designing lessons, conducting research, writing grant proposals, managing budgets, grading student work and designing their own interactive learning tools, among other uses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When we looked into the data late last year, we saw that of all the ways people were using Claude, education made up two out of the top four use cases,” says Drew Bent, education lead at Anthropic and one of the researchers who led the study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That includes both students and professors. Bent says those findings inspired a report on \u003ca href=\"https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-how-university-students-use-claude\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">how university students use the AI chatbot\u003c/a> and the most recent research on professor use of Claude.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>How professors are using AI \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Anthropic’s report is based on roughly 74,000 conversations that users with higher education email addresses had with Claude over an 11-day period in late May and early June of this year. The company used an automated tool to analyze the conversations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The majority — or 57% of the conversations analyzed — related to curriculum development, like designing lesson plans and assignments. Bent says one of the more surprising findings was professors using Claude to develop interactive simulations for students, like web-based games.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s helping write the code so that you can have an interactive simulation that you as an educator can share with students in your class for them to help understand a concept,” Bent says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second most common way professors used Claude was for academic research — this comprised 13% of conversations. Educators also used the AI chatbot to complete administrative tasks, including budget plans, drafting letters of recommendation and creating meeting agendas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Their analysis suggests professors tend to automate more tedious and routine work, including financial and administrative tasks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But for other areas like teaching and lesson design, it was much more of a collaborative process, where the educators and the AI assistant are going back and forth and collaborating on it together,” Bent says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The data comes with caveats – Anthropic \u003ca href=\"https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-how-educators-use-claude\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">published its findings\u003c/a> but did not release the full data behind them – including how many professors were in the analysis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the research captured a snapshot in time; the period studied encompassed the tail end of the academic year. Had they analyzed an 11-day period in October, Bent says, for example, the results could have been different.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Grading student work with AI\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>About 7% of the conversations Anthropic analyzed were about grading student work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When educators use AI for grading, they often automate a lot of it away, and they have AI do significant parts of the grading,” Bent says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company partnered with Northeastern University on this research – surveying 22 faculty members about how and why they use Claude. In their survey responses, university faculty said grading student work was the task the chatbot was least effective at.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not clear whether any of the assessments Claude produced actually factored into the grades and feedback students received.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nevertheless, Marc Watkins, a lecturer and researcher at the University of Mississippi, fears that Anthropic’s findings signal a disturbing trend. Watkins studies the impact of AI on higher education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This sort of nightmare scenario that we might be running into is students using AI to write papers and teachers using AI to grade the same papers. If that’s the case, then what’s the purpose of education?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Watkins says he’s also alarmed by the use of AI in ways that he says, devalue professor-student relationships.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you’re just using this to automate some portion of your life, whether that’s writing emails to students, letters of recommendation, grading or providing feedback, I’m really against that,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Professors and faculty need guidance \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Kasun — the professor from Georgia State — also doesn’t believe professors should use AI for grading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She wishes colleges and universities had more support and guidance on how best to use this new technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are here, sort of alone in the forest, fending for ourselves,” Kasun says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Drew Bent, with Anthropic, says \u003ca href=\"https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-higher-education-initiatives\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">companies like his should partner\u003c/a> with higher education institutions. He cautions: “Us as a tech company, telling educators what to do or what not to do is not the right way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But educators and those working in AI, like Bent, agree that the decisions made now over how to incorporate AI in college and university courses will impact students for years to come.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Writing can be hard, equal parts heavy lifting and drudgery. No wonder so many students are turning to the time-saving allure of ChatGPT, which can crank out entire papers in seconds. It rescues them from procrastination jams and dreaded all-nighters, magically freeing up more time for other pursuits, like, say … doomscrolling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, no one learns to be a better writer when someone else (or some AI bot) is doing the work for them. The question is whether chatbots can morph into decent writing teachers or coaches that students actually want to consult to improve their writing, and not just use for shortcuts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jennifer Meyer, an assistant professor at the University of Vienna in Austria, has been studying how AI bots can be used to improve student writing for several years. In an interview, she explained why she is cautious about the ability of AI to make us better writers and is still testing how to use the new technology effectively.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>All in the timing \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Meyer says that just because ChatGPT is available 24/7 doesn’t mean students should consult it at the start of the writing process. Instead, Meyer believes that students would generally learn more if they wrote a first draft on their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s when AI could be most helpful, she thinks. With some prompting, a chatbot could provide immediate writing feedback targeted to each students’ needs. One student might need to practice writing shorter sentences. Another might be struggling with story structure and outlining. AI could theoretically meet an entire classroom’s individual needs faster than a human teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Meyer’s experiments, she inserted AI only after the first draft was done as part of the revision process. In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X23000784\">study\u003c/a> published in 2024, she randomly assigned 200 German high school students to receive AI feedback after writing a draft of an essay in English. Their revised essays were stronger than those of 250 students who were also told to revise, but didn’t get help from AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In surveys, those with AI feedback also said they felt more motivated to rewrite than those who didn’t get feedback. That motivation is critical. Often students aren’t in the mood to rewrite, and without revisions, students can’t become better writers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meyer doesn’t consider her experiment proof that AI is a great writing teacher. She didn’t compare it with how student writing improved after human feedback. Her experiment compared only AI feedback with no feedback.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most importantly, one dose of AI writing feedback wasn’t enough to elevate students’ writing skills. On a second, fresh essay topic, the students who had previously received AI feedback didn’t write any better than the students who hadn’t been helped by AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s unclear how many rounds of AI feedback it would take to boost a student’s writing skills more permanently, not just help revise the essay at hand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And Meyer doesn’t know whether a student would want to keep discussing writing with an AI bot over and over again. Maybe students were willing to engage with it in this experiment because it was a novelty, but could soon tire of it. That’s next on Meyer’s research agenda.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A viral MIT study\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A much smaller MIT study published earlier this year echoes Meyer’s theory. “\u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1\">Your Brain on ChatGPT\u003c/a>” went viral because it seemed to say that using ChatGPT to help write an essay made students’ brains less engaged. Researchers found that students who wrote an essay without any online tools had stronger brain connectivity and activity than students who used AI or consulted Google to search for source materials. (Using Google while writing wasn’t nearly as bad for the brain as AI.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although those results made \u003ca href=\"https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/\">headlines\u003c/a>, there was more to the experiment. The students who initially wrote an essay on their own were later given ChatGPT to help improve their essays. That switch to ChatGPT boosted brain activity, in contrast to what the neuroscientists found during the initial writing process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These studies add to the evidence that delaying AI a bit, after some initial thinking and drafting, could be a sweet spot in learning. That’s something researchers need to test more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Meyer remains concerned about giving AI tools to very weak writers and to young children who haven’t developed basic writing skills. “This could be a real problem,” said Meyer. “It could be detrimental to use these tools too early.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Cheating your way to learning?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Meyer doesn’t think it’s always a bad idea for students to ask ChatGPT to do the writing for them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just as young artists learn to paint by copying masterpieces in museums, students might learn to write better by copying good writing. (The late great New Yorker editor John Bennet taught Jill to write this way. He called it “copy work” and he encouraged his journalism students to do it every week by copying longhand the words of legendary writers, not AI.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meyer suggests that students ask ChatGPT to write a sample essay that meets their teacher’s assignment and grading criteria. The next step is key. If students pretend it’s their own piece and submit it, that’s cheating. They’ve also offloaded cognitive work to technology and haven’t learned anything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the AI essay can be an effective teaching tool, in theory, if students study the arguments, organizational structure, sentence construction and vocabulary before writing a new draft in their own words. Ideally, the next assignment should be better if students have learned through that analysis and internalized the style and techniques of the model essay, Meyer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My hypothesis would be as long as there’s cognitive effort with it, as long as there’s a lot of time on task and like critical thinking about the output, then it should be fine,” said Meyer.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Reconsidering praise\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Everyone likes a compliment. But too much praise can drown learning just as too much water can keep flowers from blooming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ChatGPT has a tendency to pour the praise on thick and often begins with banal flattery, like “Great job!” even when a student’s writing needs a lot of work. In Meyer’s test of whether AI feedback can improve students’ writing, she intentionally told ChatGPT not to start with praise and instead go straight to constructive criticism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her parsimonious approach to praise was inspired by a \u003ca href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0969594X.2023.2179956\">2023 writing study\u003c/a> about what motivates students to revise. The study found that when teachers started off with general praise, students were left with the false impression that their work was already good enough so they didn’t put in the extra effort to rewrite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Meyer’s experiment, the praise-free feedback was effective in getting students to revise and improve their essays. But she didn’t set up a direct competition between the two approaches — praise-free vs. praise-full — so we don’t know for sure which is more effective when students are interacting with AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Being stingy with praise rubs real teachers the wrong way. After Meyer removed praise from the feedback, teachers told her they wanted to restore it. “They wondered about why the feedback was so negative,” Meyer said. “That’s not how they would do it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meyer and other researchers may one day solve the puzzle of how to turn AI chatbots into great writing coaches. But whether students will have the willpower or desire to forgo an instantly written essay is another matter. As long as ChatGPT continues to allow students to take the easy way out, it’s human nature to do so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Shirley Liu is a graduate student in education at Northwestern University. Liu reported and wrote this story along with The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-ai-writing-meyer/\">\u003cem>using AI to become a better writer\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Writing can be hard, equal parts heavy lifting and drudgery. No wonder so many students are turning to the time-saving allure of ChatGPT, which can crank out entire papers in seconds. It rescues them from procrastination jams and dreaded all-nighters, magically freeing up more time for other pursuits, like, say … doomscrolling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, no one learns to be a better writer when someone else (or some AI bot) is doing the work for them. The question is whether chatbots can morph into decent writing teachers or coaches that students actually want to consult to improve their writing, and not just use for shortcuts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jennifer Meyer, an assistant professor at the University of Vienna in Austria, has been studying how AI bots can be used to improve student writing for several years. In an interview, she explained why she is cautious about the ability of AI to make us better writers and is still testing how to use the new technology effectively.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>All in the timing \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Meyer says that just because ChatGPT is available 24/7 doesn’t mean students should consult it at the start of the writing process. Instead, Meyer believes that students would generally learn more if they wrote a first draft on their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s when AI could be most helpful, she thinks. With some prompting, a chatbot could provide immediate writing feedback targeted to each students’ needs. One student might need to practice writing shorter sentences. Another might be struggling with story structure and outlining. AI could theoretically meet an entire classroom’s individual needs faster than a human teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Meyer’s experiments, she inserted AI only after the first draft was done as part of the revision process. In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X23000784\">study\u003c/a> published in 2024, she randomly assigned 200 German high school students to receive AI feedback after writing a draft of an essay in English. Their revised essays were stronger than those of 250 students who were also told to revise, but didn’t get help from AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In surveys, those with AI feedback also said they felt more motivated to rewrite than those who didn’t get feedback. That motivation is critical. Often students aren’t in the mood to rewrite, and without revisions, students can’t become better writers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meyer doesn’t consider her experiment proof that AI is a great writing teacher. She didn’t compare it with how student writing improved after human feedback. Her experiment compared only AI feedback with no feedback.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most importantly, one dose of AI writing feedback wasn’t enough to elevate students’ writing skills. On a second, fresh essay topic, the students who had previously received AI feedback didn’t write any better than the students who hadn’t been helped by AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s unclear how many rounds of AI feedback it would take to boost a student’s writing skills more permanently, not just help revise the essay at hand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And Meyer doesn’t know whether a student would want to keep discussing writing with an AI bot over and over again. Maybe students were willing to engage with it in this experiment because it was a novelty, but could soon tire of it. That’s next on Meyer’s research agenda.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A viral MIT study\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A much smaller MIT study published earlier this year echoes Meyer’s theory. “\u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1\">Your Brain on ChatGPT\u003c/a>” went viral because it seemed to say that using ChatGPT to help write an essay made students’ brains less engaged. Researchers found that students who wrote an essay without any online tools had stronger brain connectivity and activity than students who used AI or consulted Google to search for source materials. (Using Google while writing wasn’t nearly as bad for the brain as AI.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although those results made \u003ca href=\"https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/\">headlines\u003c/a>, there was more to the experiment. The students who initially wrote an essay on their own were later given ChatGPT to help improve their essays. That switch to ChatGPT boosted brain activity, in contrast to what the neuroscientists found during the initial writing process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These studies add to the evidence that delaying AI a bit, after some initial thinking and drafting, could be a sweet spot in learning. That’s something researchers need to test more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Meyer remains concerned about giving AI tools to very weak writers and to young children who haven’t developed basic writing skills. “This could be a real problem,” said Meyer. “It could be detrimental to use these tools too early.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Cheating your way to learning?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Meyer doesn’t think it’s always a bad idea for students to ask ChatGPT to do the writing for them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just as young artists learn to paint by copying masterpieces in museums, students might learn to write better by copying good writing. (The late great New Yorker editor John Bennet taught Jill to write this way. He called it “copy work” and he encouraged his journalism students to do it every week by copying longhand the words of legendary writers, not AI.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meyer suggests that students ask ChatGPT to write a sample essay that meets their teacher’s assignment and grading criteria. The next step is key. If students pretend it’s their own piece and submit it, that’s cheating. They’ve also offloaded cognitive work to technology and haven’t learned anything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the AI essay can be an effective teaching tool, in theory, if students study the arguments, organizational structure, sentence construction and vocabulary before writing a new draft in their own words. Ideally, the next assignment should be better if students have learned through that analysis and internalized the style and techniques of the model essay, Meyer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My hypothesis would be as long as there’s cognitive effort with it, as long as there’s a lot of time on task and like critical thinking about the output, then it should be fine,” said Meyer.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Reconsidering praise\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Everyone likes a compliment. But too much praise can drown learning just as too much water can keep flowers from blooming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ChatGPT has a tendency to pour the praise on thick and often begins with banal flattery, like “Great job!” even when a student’s writing needs a lot of work. In Meyer’s test of whether AI feedback can improve students’ writing, she intentionally told ChatGPT not to start with praise and instead go straight to constructive criticism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her parsimonious approach to praise was inspired by a \u003ca href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0969594X.2023.2179956\">2023 writing study\u003c/a> about what motivates students to revise. The study found that when teachers started off with general praise, students were left with the false impression that their work was already good enough so they didn’t put in the extra effort to rewrite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Meyer’s experiment, the praise-free feedback was effective in getting students to revise and improve their essays. But she didn’t set up a direct competition between the two approaches — praise-free vs. praise-full — so we don’t know for sure which is more effective when students are interacting with AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Being stingy with praise rubs real teachers the wrong way. After Meyer removed praise from the feedback, teachers told her they wanted to restore it. “They wondered about why the feedback was so negative,” Meyer said. “That’s not how they would do it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meyer and other researchers may one day solve the puzzle of how to turn AI chatbots into great writing coaches. But whether students will have the willpower or desire to forgo an instantly written essay is another matter. As long as ChatGPT continues to allow students to take the easy way out, it’s human nature to do so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Shirley Liu is a graduate student in education at Northwestern University. Liu reported and wrote this story along with The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Students are using ChatGPT more than ever — and ChatGPT knows it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last week, OpenAI launched “study mode” in its chatbot, aimed directly at the student market. It’s meant to behave more like a tutor than a machine that spits out answers; it uses the Socratic method, builds quizzes and creates study plans. The same day, Google announced a suite of study-oriented tools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, how does generative AI compare to old-school tools like textbooks and online homework helpers like Chegg and Quizlet? Do they still have a place?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I first asked ChatGPT: “Would you recommend I use you as a study tool? How do you compare to textbooks and edtech companies?” The answer: “Yes, I can absolutely be a useful study tool, but the best results come from knowing how and when to use me alongside textbooks and edtech platforms.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then I talked to people running some of those platforms and some students who use (or once used) them. As generative AI plants its stake in education, they’re all doing what they can to acclimate.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How companies are adapting\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Chegg sells textbooks and offers a slate of digital services, such as generating flash cards and practice questions. In May, the company laid off about 250 employees, or 22% of its workforce, partly due to students turning to generative AI, it confirmed to NPR. But rather than trying to expand its reach, it’s zooming in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We were trying to be everything to every student in a pre-AI world,” Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several generative AI platforms, including ChatGPT, have free plans. Chegg hopes to reach students who will pay $19.99 a month for tools that encourage long-term use and goal setting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you think about the fitness world, those apps and those services tend to be much more guided to getting you to your goal,” Schultz says. “They’re giving you, ‘Every week we’re going to do this many miles or this many rides or this much work,’ and that’s how we’ve been designing our service.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Chegg is also wrapping AI models into its platform. A new feature shows subscribers side-by-side panels with Chegg’s answer to a question next to answers from other platforms, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Macmillan Learning sells textbooks and e-books, and it offers quizzes and study guides. Like Chegg, it has incorporated an AI tool into its paid plan and began rolling it out late last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Macmillan’s tool doesn’t give students straight-up answers; instead, it guides them to the solution through open-ended questions that expose flawed thinking (aka the Socratic method).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It Socratically supports them so that they have that learning experience that they can use … when they have to do it themselves on the exam,” says Tim Flem, Macmillan Learning’s chief product officer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Flem claims Macmillan’s AI tutor is more accurate than AI chatbots, as it draws from the company’s textbooks. The platform also reduces “content switching,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you’re switching between that tab and that tab, you notice how you’re always kind of like, ‘Wait a minute, what did it say over here?'” Flem says. “So our AI tutor is right there next to the problem that the student is working on.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How students are adapting\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Some students are mixing and matching AI and traditional tools. Bryan Wheatley combined ChatGPT with Quizlet and Socratic (another AI tool) to study. A recent graduate of Prairie View A&M University in Texas, he initially approached ChatGPT with trepidation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/2000x1333+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ff6%2F04%2F47557dbd442383221d3004cd1cc1%2Fstudents-5.jpg\" alt=\"Bryan Wheatley graduated from Prairie View A&M University last year with a degree in sociology.\">\u003cfigcaption>Bryan Wheatley graduated from Prairie View A&M University last year with a degree in sociology. \u003ccite> (Grace Raver | NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Something that’s really adaptive is kind of crazy in a sense,” he says, though he went on to use it to outline essays and for other tasks. He says ChatGPT is correct about half the time, and he had to do a lot of cross-referencing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was one of the 66% of students in bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral programs using ChatGPT regularly, according to July 2024 research from \u003ca href=\"https://www.digitaleducationcouncil.com/post/what-students-want-key-results-from-dec-global-ai-student-survey-2024\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the Digital Education Council\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The survey also found that over 50% of students believed too much reliance on AI would negatively impact their academic performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sally Simpson is trying to hold the line. The Georgetown University student, who’s working on a Ph.D. in German literature, does not use generative AI. In her undergrad days, she used websites like Quizlet and SparkNotes to reinforce information she processed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, she sees undergraduates use generative AI to complete homework assignments and summarize bodies of work they didn’t read. “It cheapens people’s education,” she says. “I think it’s an important skill to be able to read an article, or read a text, and not only be able to summarize it, but think about it critically.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/1900x1358+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fcc%2F16%2F7808caae4ebfbcfde6b67cc083eb%2Fstudents-09.jpg\" alt=\"Sally Simpson is studying for a doctorate in German literature at Georgetown University.\">\u003cfigcaption>Sally Simpson is studying for a doctorate in German literature at Georgetown University. \u003ccite> (Grace Raver | NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Dontrell Shoulders, a senior studying social work at Kentucky State University, was an avid Quizlet user and still uses it to study for tests. With Quizlet, he has to seek out answers. Generative AI doesn’t provide much of a challenge, he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’re just putting something in a computer, having to type it up, and just like, ‘Here you go,’ ” he says. “Are you going to remember it after you just typed it in? You’re not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>How professors are adapting\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Amy Lawyer, the department chair of equine administration at the University of Louisville’s business school, says some students still use online study guides like Chegg and SparkNotes. “Students are to a point where they’re going to use any resources available to them,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of those resources, ChatGPT has had the most significant impact on her classroom. She uses it herself for editing and encourages her students to do the same. To stop them from plagiarizing or overusing AI chatbots, however, she’s now issuing more assignments that must be handwritten or completed in class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ayelet Fishbach, a marketing and behavioral science professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, says students will always find shortcuts, no matter how the technology evolves. “Cheating has not been invented recently,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What is different now is that the line seems, to many people, more blurry,” she says. “If before you knew you were cheating, now you feel, ‘Maybe I’m still doing what I’m supposed to do, only I’m being more efficient.’ This is confusing for students, and we do try to support them.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Students are using ChatGPT more than ever — and ChatGPT knows it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last week, OpenAI launched “study mode” in its chatbot, aimed directly at the student market. It’s meant to behave more like a tutor than a machine that spits out answers; it uses the Socratic method, builds quizzes and creates study plans. The same day, Google announced a suite of study-oriented tools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, how does generative AI compare to old-school tools like textbooks and online homework helpers like Chegg and Quizlet? Do they still have a place?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I first asked ChatGPT: “Would you recommend I use you as a study tool? How do you compare to textbooks and edtech companies?” The answer: “Yes, I can absolutely be a useful study tool, but the best results come from knowing how and when to use me alongside textbooks and edtech platforms.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then I talked to people running some of those platforms and some students who use (or once used) them. As generative AI plants its stake in education, they’re all doing what they can to acclimate.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How companies are adapting\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Chegg sells textbooks and offers a slate of digital services, such as generating flash cards and practice questions. In May, the company laid off about 250 employees, or 22% of its workforce, partly due to students turning to generative AI, it confirmed to NPR. But rather than trying to expand its reach, it’s zooming in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We were trying to be everything to every student in a pre-AI world,” Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several generative AI platforms, including ChatGPT, have free plans. Chegg hopes to reach students who will pay $19.99 a month for tools that encourage long-term use and goal setting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you think about the fitness world, those apps and those services tend to be much more guided to getting you to your goal,” Schultz says. “They’re giving you, ‘Every week we’re going to do this many miles or this many rides or this much work,’ and that’s how we’ve been designing our service.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Chegg is also wrapping AI models into its platform. A new feature shows subscribers side-by-side panels with Chegg’s answer to a question next to answers from other platforms, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Macmillan Learning sells textbooks and e-books, and it offers quizzes and study guides. Like Chegg, it has incorporated an AI tool into its paid plan and began rolling it out late last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Macmillan’s tool doesn’t give students straight-up answers; instead, it guides them to the solution through open-ended questions that expose flawed thinking (aka the Socratic method).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It Socratically supports them so that they have that learning experience that they can use … when they have to do it themselves on the exam,” says Tim Flem, Macmillan Learning’s chief product officer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Flem claims Macmillan’s AI tutor is more accurate than AI chatbots, as it draws from the company’s textbooks. The platform also reduces “content switching,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you’re switching between that tab and that tab, you notice how you’re always kind of like, ‘Wait a minute, what did it say over here?'” Flem says. “So our AI tutor is right there next to the problem that the student is working on.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How students are adapting\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Some students are mixing and matching AI and traditional tools. Bryan Wheatley combined ChatGPT with Quizlet and Socratic (another AI tool) to study. A recent graduate of Prairie View A&M University in Texas, he initially approached ChatGPT with trepidation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/2000x1333+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ff6%2F04%2F47557dbd442383221d3004cd1cc1%2Fstudents-5.jpg\" alt=\"Bryan Wheatley graduated from Prairie View A&M University last year with a degree in sociology.\">\u003cfigcaption>Bryan Wheatley graduated from Prairie View A&M University last year with a degree in sociology. \u003ccite> (Grace Raver | NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Something that’s really adaptive is kind of crazy in a sense,” he says, though he went on to use it to outline essays and for other tasks. He says ChatGPT is correct about half the time, and he had to do a lot of cross-referencing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was one of the 66% of students in bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral programs using ChatGPT regularly, according to July 2024 research from \u003ca href=\"https://www.digitaleducationcouncil.com/post/what-students-want-key-results-from-dec-global-ai-student-survey-2024\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the Digital Education Council\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The survey also found that over 50% of students believed too much reliance on AI would negatively impact their academic performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sally Simpson is trying to hold the line. The Georgetown University student, who’s working on a Ph.D. in German literature, does not use generative AI. In her undergrad days, she used websites like Quizlet and SparkNotes to reinforce information she processed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, she sees undergraduates use generative AI to complete homework assignments and summarize bodies of work they didn’t read. “It cheapens people’s education,” she says. “I think it’s an important skill to be able to read an article, or read a text, and not only be able to summarize it, but think about it critically.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/1900x1358+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fcc%2F16%2F7808caae4ebfbcfde6b67cc083eb%2Fstudents-09.jpg\" alt=\"Sally Simpson is studying for a doctorate in German literature at Georgetown University.\">\u003cfigcaption>Sally Simpson is studying for a doctorate in German literature at Georgetown University. \u003ccite> (Grace Raver | NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Dontrell Shoulders, a senior studying social work at Kentucky State University, was an avid Quizlet user and still uses it to study for tests. With Quizlet, he has to seek out answers. Generative AI doesn’t provide much of a challenge, he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’re just putting something in a computer, having to type it up, and just like, ‘Here you go,’ ” he says. “Are you going to remember it after you just typed it in? You’re not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>How professors are adapting\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Amy Lawyer, the department chair of equine administration at the University of Louisville’s business school, says some students still use online study guides like Chegg and SparkNotes. “Students are to a point where they’re going to use any resources available to them,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of those resources, ChatGPT has had the most significant impact on her classroom. She uses it herself for editing and encourages her students to do the same. To stop them from plagiarizing or overusing AI chatbots, however, she’s now issuing more assignments that must be handwritten or completed in class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ayelet Fishbach, a marketing and behavioral science professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, says students will always find shortcuts, no matter how the technology evolves. “Cheating has not been invented recently,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
"airtime": "SUN 9pm-10pm",
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"meta": {
"site": "radio",
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},
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510312/podcast.xml"
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},
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.commonwealthclub.org/podcasts",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/Commonwealth-Club-of-California-p1060/"
}
},
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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},
"freakonomics-radio": {
"id": "freakonomics-radio",
"title": "Freakonomics Radio",
"info": "Freakonomics Radio is a one-hour award-winning podcast and public-radio project hosted by Stephen Dubner, with co-author Steve Levitt as a regular guest. It is produced in partnership with WNYC.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/freakonomicsRadio.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
"rss": "https://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio"
}
},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
"info": "Hosted by Terry Gross, \u003cem>Fresh Air from WHYY\u003c/em> is the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues. One of public radio's most popular programs, Fresh Air features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries.",
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"link": "/radio/program/fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/381444908/podcast.xml"
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"id": "here-and-now",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Here-And-Now-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510051/podcast.xml"
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
"title": "Hidden Brain",
"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510308/podcast.xml"
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},
"how-i-built-this": {
"id": "how-i-built-this",
"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/3zxy",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510313/podcast.xml"
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
"imageAlt": "KQED Hyphenación",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
"meta": {
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/2p3Fifq96nw9BPcmFdIq0o?si=39209f7b25774f38",
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"amazon": "https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6c3dd23c-93fb-4aab-97ba-1725fa6315f1/hyphenaci%C3%B3n",
"rss": "https://feeds.megaphone.fm/KQINC2275451163"
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
}
},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Masters-of-Scale-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "http://mastersofscale.app.link/",
"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mindshift-podcast/id1078765985",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/464615685/mind-shift-podcast",
"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kqed/stories-teachers-share",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1567098962",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/0OLWoyizopu6tY1XiuX70x",
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"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/show/on-our-watch",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
}
},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/otm",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-the-Media-p69/",
"rss": "http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia"
}
},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
"title": "PBS NewsHour",
"info": "Analysis, background reports and updates from the PBS NewsHour putting today's news in context.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/PBS-News-Hour-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "pbs"
},
"link": "/radio/program/pbs-newshour",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pbs-newshour-full-show/id394432287?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
"rss": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/show"
}
},
"perspectives": {
"id": "perspectives",
"title": "Perspectives",
"tagline": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991",
"info": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Perspectives_Tile_Final.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/perspectives/",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 14
},
"link": "/perspectives",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id73801135",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/432309616/perspectives",
"rss": "https://ww2.kqed.org/perspectives/category/perspectives/feed/",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93dzIua3FlZC5vcmcvcGVyc3BlY3RpdmVzL2NhdGVnb3J5L3BlcnNwZWN0aXZlcy9mZWVkLw"
}
},
"planet-money": {
"id": "planet-money",
"title": "Planet Money",
"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
"airtime": "SUN 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/planetmoney.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/sections/money/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/planet-money",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/M4f5",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id290783428?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/Planet-Money-p164680/",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510289/podcast.xml"
}
},
"politicalbreakdown": {
"id": "politicalbreakdown",
"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Political-Breakdown-2024-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Political Breakdown",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 5
},
"link": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/political-breakdown/id1327641087",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5Nzk2MzI2MTEx",
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