Calculus is a critical on-ramp to careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). But getting to those careers means surviving the academic journey.
While there’s been progress of late, it’s been “uneven” and Black, Hispanic and women workers are still underrepresented in some STEM fields. Traditional methods of calculus instruction may be knocking students off the path to these vital occupations, which is why advocates warn that getting diverse students into these careers may require instructional models more responsive to students. Meanwhile, the country is struggling to fill vacancies in related fields like semiconductor manufacturing, despite sizable investments — a feat that may require stabilizing the pipeline.
Good news: There’s mounting evidence that changing calculus instruction works for the groups usually pushed out of STEM. At least, that’s according to a randomized study recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Science.
So, as educators, mentors, and guides to our future generations, we must ask ourselves three pivotal questions:
What value do we offer to our students?
What value will they need to offer to the world?
How are we preparing them to offer that value?
The answers to these questions are crucial, and they will redefine the trajectory of our education system.
We need to create an environment that encourages curiosity, embraces failure as a learning opportunity, and celebrates diversity. We need to teach our students how to learn, how to ask the right questions, and how to think for themselves.
Leveraging ChatGPT for learning is the most meaningful skill this year for lifelong learners. But it’s too hard to find resources to master it.
As a learning science nerd, I’ve explored hundreds of prompts over the past months. Most of the advice doesn’t go beyond text summaries and multiple-choice testing.
That’s why I’ve created this article — it merges learning science with prompt writing to help you learn anything faster.
Midjourney AI Art for Teachers (for any kind of teacher, not just Art Teachers) — from The AI Educator on YouTube by Dan Fitzpatrick
From DSC: This is a very nice, clearly illustrated, free video to get started with the Midjourney (text-to-image) app. Nice work Dan!
In the new-normal of generative AI, how does one articulate the value of academic integrity? This blog presents my current response in about 2,500 words; a complete answer could fill a sizable book.
Massive amounts of misinformation are disseminated about generative AI, so the first part of my discussion clarifies what large language models (Chat-GPT and its counterparts) can currently do and what they cannot accomplish at this point in time. The second part describes ways in which generative AI can be misused as a means of learning; unfortunately, many people are now advocating for these mistaken applications to education. The third part describes ways in which large language models (LLM), used well, may substantially improve learning and education. I close with a plea for a robust, informed public discussion about these topics and issues.
Many of the more than a dozen teachers TIME interviewed for this story argue that the way to get kids to care is to proactively use ChatGPT in the classroom.
…
Some of those creative ideas are already in effect at Peninsula High School in Gig Harbor, about an hour from Seattle. In Erin Rossing’s precalculus class, a student got ChatGPT to generate a rap about vectors and trigonometry in the style of Kanye West, while geometry students used the program to write mathematical proofs in the style of raps, which they performed in a classroom competition. In Kara Beloate’s English-Language Arts class, she allowed students reading Shakespeare’s Othello to use ChatGPT to translate lines into modern English to help them understand the text, so that they could spend class time discussing the plot and themes.
I found that other developed countries share concerns about students cheating but are moving quickly to use AI to personalize education, enhance language lessons and help teachers with mundane tasks, such as grading. Some of these countries are in the early stages of training teachers to use AI and developing curriculum standards for what students should know and be able to do with the technology.
Several countries began positioning themselves several years ago to invest in AI in education in order to compete in the fourth industrial revolution.
AI in Education— from educationnext.org by John Bailey The leap into a new era of machine intelligence carries risks and challenges, but also plenty of promise
In the realm of education, this technology will influence how students learn, how teachers work, and ultimately how we structure our education system. Some educators and leaders look forward to these changes with great enthusiasm. Sal Kahn, founder of Khan Academy, went so far as to say in a TED talk that AI has the potential to effect “probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” But others warn that AI will enable the spread of misinformation, facilitate cheating in school and college, kill whatever vestiges of individual privacy remain, and cause massive job loss. The challenge is to harness the positive potential while avoiding or mitigating the harm.
Generative AI and education futures — from ucl.ac.uk Video highlights from Professor Mike Sharples’ keynote address at the 2023 UCL Education Conference, which explored opportunities to prosper with AI as a part of education.
Bringing AI Literacy to High Schools— from by Nikki Goth Itoi Stanford education researchers collaborated with teachers to develop classroom-ready AI resources for high school instructors across subject areas.
To address these two imperatives, all high schools need access to basic AI tools and training. Yet the reality is that many underserved schools in low-income areas lack the bandwidth, skills, and confidence to guide their students through an AI-powered world. And if the pattern continues, AI will only worsen existing inequities. With this concern top of mind plus initial funding from the McCoy Ethics Center, Lee began recruiting some graduate students and high school teachers to explore how to give more people equal footing in the AI space.
The status quo is far from inevitable. In fact, we know the solution to this reading crisis, but we are not using the solution at scale. More than 50 years of research compiled by the National Institutes of Health, and continued through further research, provides a clear picture of how skilled reading develops and of effective literacy instruction. These strategies and methods—collectively called scientifically based reading instruction, which is grounded in the science of reading—could dramatically reduce the rate of reading failure. Past estimates have found that while 3 in 10 children struggle to read (and that rate has grown higher since the pandemic), research indicates that more than 90% of all students could learn to read if they had access to teachers who employed scientifically based reading instruction.
Now a nonprofit co-founded by Havens has invented a computational programming platform built around one of the few technologies that people in prison do have access to: highly restricted, text-only e-mail. And as this facility begins to offer new opportunities, more and more incarcerated people are working on advanced mathematics to give meaning to their years behind bars.
ChatGPT Prompts for Learner Motivation — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman Three mega-prompts to motivate your learners like a pro
So, what can we – as educators and creators of ed-tech – do to build our learners’ intrinsic motivation and, in the process, drive both inclusion and achievement?
To help answer this question, I’ve put together a short guide. The guide includes:
A whistle-stop tour of the science of intrinsic motivation.
Three ChatGPT mega-prompts so you can apply the theory to the way you design learning experiences (and, perhaps, ed-tech products) and optimise for intrinsic motivation today.
Even discounting for hyperbole, the release of ChatGPT suggests that we’re at the dawn of an era marked by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, with far-reaching consequences for nearly every facet of society, including higher education. From admissions to assessment, academic integrity to scholarly research, university operations to disappearing jobs, here’s how 12 professors, administrators, and writers answer the question: How will AI change higher education?
We’ve trained a model to achieve a new state-of-the-art in mathematical problem solving by rewarding each correct step of reasoning (“process supervision”) instead of simply rewarding the correct final answer (“outcome supervision”). In addition to boosting performance relative to outcome supervision, process supervision also has an important alignment benefit: it directly trains the model to produce a chain-of-thought that is endorsed by humans.
In the fifth free webinar on AI for Education, I am joined by Dean Pearman, Head of Education at Beaconhills College and Tom Oliphant, Head of Technology and Enterprise at St John’s Grammar School. We explore questions about creativity, design and the new skills that are emerging. Join us to invest in your AI Literacy. Expand your toolset, broaden your understanding, and challenge your thinking.
You are watching the fourth free webinar, a dialogue about AI for education with Sophie Fenton, Steve Brophy and hosted by Tom Barrett Building Blocks – key AI concepts to learn. Practical frameworks for navigating the challenges of AI for education. Be part of a dialogue on provocations about AI and human centred education, truth and identity.
Using ChatGPT in Math Lesson Planning — from edutopia.org by Kristen Moore Artificial intelligence tools are useful beyond language arts classes. Math teachers can use them to save time and create interesting lessons.
Democratic Inputs to AI — from openai.com Our nonprofit organization, OpenAI, Inc., is launching a program to award ten $100,000 grants to fund experiments in setting up a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow, within the bounds defined by the law.
AI Canon — from a16z.com (Andreessen Horowitz) by Derrick Harris, Matt Bornstein, and Guido Appenzeller; via The Neuron newsletter
Excerpts:
Research in artificial intelligence is increasing at an exponential rate. It’s difficult for AI experts to keep up with everything new being published, and even harder for beginners to know where to start. So, in this post, we’re sharing a curated list of resources we’ve relied on to get smarter about modern AI. We call it the “AI Canon” because these papers, blog posts, courses, and guides have had an outsized impact on the field over the past several years.
Students from the 6th grade at Nathan Hale School complete a “bingo challenge” as part of the Red Sox Hall of Fame stop on their guided tour of the Fenway Park Learning Lab.
Excerpt:
The six-stop tour has students learning history, geography, math, and science. Student visitors get baseball caps, t-shirts, and a backpack full of other souvenir items like baseball cards, binoculars, a calculator, and a pen. The most important piece of equipment may be a 40-page, seriously substantive workbook, developed with the Boston Public Schools, that students work their way through along the hourlong guided tour.
Micro-tutoring platform PhotoStudy has unveiled a new chatbot built on OpenAI’s ChatGPT APIs that can teach a complete elementary algebra textbook with “extremely high accuracy,” the company said.
“Textbook publishers and teachers can now transform their textbooks and teaching with a ChatGPT-like assistant that can teach all the material in a textbook, assess student progress, provide personalized help in weaker areas, generate quizzes with support for text, images, audio, and ultimately a student customized avatar for video interaction,” PhotoStudy said in its news release.
Some sample questions the MathGPT tool can answer:
“I don’t know how to solve a linear equation…”
“I have no idea what’s going on in class but we are doing Chapter 2. Can we start at the top?”
“Can you help me understand how to solve this mixture of coins problem?”
“I need to practice for my midterm tomorrow, through Chapter 6. Help.”
From DSC: A few items re: ChatGPT — with some items pro-chat and other items against the use of ChatGPT (or at least to limit its use).
How About We Put Learning at the Center? — from insidehighered.com by John Warner The ongoing freak-out about ChatGPT sent me back to considering the fundamentals.
Excerpt:
So, when people express concern that students will use ChatGPT to complete their assignments, I understand the concern, but what I don’t understand is why this concern is so often channeled into discussions about how to police student behavior, rather than using this as an opportunity to exam the kind of work we actually ask students (and faculty) to do around learning.
If ChatGPT can do the things we ask students to do in order to demonstrate learning, it seems possible to me that those things should’ve been questioned a long time ago. It’s why I continue to believe this technology is an opportunity for reinvention, precisely because it is a threat to the status quo.
Top AI conference bans use of ChatGPT and AI language tools to write academic papers — from theverge.com by James Vincent; with thanks to Anna Mills for this resource AI tools can be used to ‘edit’ and ‘polish’ authors’ work, say the conference organizers, but text ‘produced entirely’ by AI is not allowed. This raises the question: where do you draw the line between editing and writing?
Excerpt:
The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) announced the policy earlier this week, stating, “Papers that include text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT are prohibited unless the produced text is presented as a part of the paper’s experimental analysis.” The news sparked widespread discussion on social media, with AI academics and researchers both defending and criticizing the policy. The conference’s organizers responded by publishing a longer statement explaining their thinking. (The ICML responded to requests from The Verge for comment by directing us to this same statement.)
I am protective of my organic writing process, but when it’s time to edit, ChatGPT sometimes helps me notice which sentences aren’t quite put together as they should be. When I ask it why it suggested a revision, it sometimes describes a word choice nuance I hadn’t thought of.
— Anna Mills, amills@mastodon.oeru.org, she/her (@EnglishOER) January 5, 2023
Instead, I want to discuss the opportunity provided by AI, because it can help us teach in new ways. The very things that make AI scary for educators — its tedency to make up facts, its lack of nuance, and its ability to make excellent student essays — can be used to make education better.
This isn’t for some future theoretical version of AI. You can create assignments, right now, using ChatGPT, that we will help stretch students in knew ways. We wrote a paper with the instructions. You can read it here, but I also want to summarize our suggestions. These are obviously not the only ways to use AI to educate, but they solve some of the hardest problems in education, and you can start experimenting with them right now.
New York City students and teachers can no longer access ChatGPT — the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that generates stunningly cogent and lifelike writing — on education department devices or internet networks, agency officials confirmed Tuesday.
SINGAPORE – Teachers in Singapore say they will likely have to move from assignments requiring regurgitation to those that require greater critical thinking, to stay ahead in the fight against plagiarism.
This comes on the back of the rise of ChatGPT, an intelligent chatbot that is able to spin essays and solve mathematical equations in seconds.
ChatGPT Is Not Ready to Teach Geometry (Yet)— from educationnext.org by Paul T. von Hippel The viral chatbot is often wrong, but never in doubt. Educators need to tread carefully.
Excerpt:
Can ChatGPT provide feedback and answer questions about math in a more tailored and natural way? The answer, for the time being, is no. Although ChatGPT can talk about math superficially, it doesn’t “understand” math with real depth. It cannot correct mathematical misconceptions, it often introduces misconceptions of its own; and it sometimes makes inexplicable mathematical errors that a basic spreadsheet or hand calculator wouldn’t make.
We asked educators on Facebook and Twitter to share with us what their goals for the classroom are for 2023. Here are a few of our favorite responses that we think will inspire you as you set your own goals for 2023:
Pre-K education has come to the forefront recently. Earlier, a kid’s first five years of education were essentially the family’s responsibility. However, research has revealed that these first five years establish the foundation for their further development.
…
It’s worth investing your time and effort in early education programs as they offer several benefits. Pre-K learning gets the children ready for academic success and empowers them for adulthood. Children who have attended early education programs are more likely to pursue higher education and receive higher salaries when they join the workforce, thus securing a better life for themselves.
Hobbies and interests are great additions to your resume. They provide potential employers with a fair idea about your personality and help them understand whether you’re the right fit for the position you are applying for.
Hobbies increase your chances of employability by demonstrating your passion and dedication. They help you become more adaptable and reduce stress thereby influencing your performance at school.
Finding a new hobby can be challenging as there are so many hobbies to choose from. A hobby is something that keeps you engaged and happy in your free time. Hence, you must choose a hobby that helps you relax your mind while, ideally, complementing your existing skills. This will give you a competitive edge over others when searching for a new job.
Here’s a list of top hobbies that will boost your resume and make you more employable.
9 Hobby Ideas You Can Add to Your Resume #1. Blogging
On the last street before leaving Jacksonville, there’s a dark brick one-story building that the locals know as the school for “bad” kids. It’s actually a tiny public school for children with disabilities. It sits across the street from farmland and is 2 miles from the Illinois city’s police department, which makes for a short trip when the school calls 911.
Administrators at the Garrison School call the police to report student misbehavior every other school day, on average. And because staff members regularly press charges against the children — some as young as 9 — officers have arrested students more than 100 times in the last five school years, an investigation by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica found. That is an astounding number given that Garrison, the only school that is part of the Four Rivers Special Education District, has fewer than 65 students in most years.
This year, the Tribune and ProPublica have been exposing the consequences for students when their schools use police as disciplinarians. The investigation “The Price Kids Pay” uncovered the practice of Illinois schools working with local law enforcement to ticket students for minor misbehavior. Reporters documented nearly 12,000 tickets in dozens of school districts, and state officials moved quickly to denounce the practice.
The list below features some of the best Math YouTube channels to help your students and kids learn math in engaging ways. I was so picky in my selection and I handpicked only those math channels that I believe would provide real educational value to students.
.
There’s not a lot of research on dysgraphia yet—but here are a few signs to look out for, plus some strategies to help affected kids express themselves. pic.twitter.com/rlb9p9D8Yu
How Inflation Is Squeezing Early Childhood Educators — from edsurge.com by Emily Tate Sullivan Rationing heat, taking on extra jobs, dipping into savings, raising wages for staff — child care providers are using a mishmash of methods to manage rising prices and keep their doors open.
STEM education has an access issue: let’s change that.
Around the world, people believe the we need more people in STEM careers. Eighty-seven percent of people believe we need to do more to encourage and retain girls in STEM education. At the same time, barriers remain – 73% of people believe underrepresented minorities often lack equal access STEM education.
Not The Science Type gets to the heart of access and gender inequity in STEM education and STEM fields. This four-part docuseries features four female scientists who are challenging stereotypes and confronting gender, racial and age discrimination as they rise to prominence.
Not The Science Type highlights four brilliant minds, showcasing women who break down boundaries within their fields – biology, engineering and science and technology-based applications. .
While each woman has taken a different path to pursue scientific excellence, they are bound by the common experience of feeling excluded, or “not the type” in traditionally homogenous fields.
HundrED Global Collection 2023 — from hundred.org Meet the 100 most impactful innovations that are changing the face of education in a post-COVID world.
Excerpt:
The year 2022 has been a year to look to the future, as the global education conversation moves again toward themes of education transformation and the futures of education. The 100 innovations selected for this year’s global collection are impacting the lives of over 95 million students worldwide. The collection highlights the important role of teachers in education innovation; the continued need for students to develop 21st century skills, including social and emotional learning; an increasing focus on student wellbeing and mental health; and equity in education.
For more information, download the full Global Collection 2023 report.
You can also browse the innovation pages of the selected innovators here. .
From DSC: Here’s an excerpt of the email I received today from EducationHQ out of Australia — though I think it applies here in the United States as well:
Not much entices a second grader to skip out on recess to get back to schoolwork. But excitement around a classroom-run business can do just that, especially when it means creating candles out of crayons and selling them in the local community.
Promotion: fifty-two students presented digital designs and architectural models of their ideal home as part of Hong Kong-based education institute My ArchiSchool’s latest exhibition. As part of the exhibition, My ArchiSchool students were asked to design their ideal home within an urban environment. The exhibition, which took place on 2 October 2022 at the Sky100 on the 100th floor of the International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong, showcased photomontages of digital designs presented alongside physical models.
We need to create opportunities for students to become more digitally aware and literate, and to be responsible when using technology. There are many ways to do this, depending on our content area and grade level. We can model best practices for our students, bring in a specific digital citizenship curriculum to guide them through their learning, or use digital tools and resources available to have students explore and create.
Helping students learn to safely navigate what has become a highly digital world is something that we are all responsible for. Students need to be aware of the impact of their posts online, how to create and manage social accounts and protect their information, and how to properly access and use resources they obtain through technology.
School and district leaders can—and should—be using social media in their work.
That’s the message shared by Stephanie McConnell, a superintendent in the Hawkins Independent School District in Texas, and Salome Thomas-El, a K-8 principal in Delaware, during an Education Week K-12 Essentials forum on Oct. 13.
At the event, McConnell and Thomas-El provided insights and advice for school leaders who are hesitant to post on certain social platforms or unsure how to use them.
This guide is all about how to get more women in tech. First, we will examine why the gender gap in tech fields exists and what we can do about it. And then, we will take a look at the best way to find opportunities for women interested in science, technology, and engineering — including scholarships, internships, and employment opportunities all geared toward the most cutting edge fields.
Closing the gap in tech is important for many reasons. Firstly, women make up 40 percent of the US workforce. With the tech industry being the fastest growing sector and others rapidly shrinking, there will be a disparity between supply and demand for employees if this continues. This is already the case in some tech sectors like cybersecurity.
Secondly, women-led companies and companies with more female employees historically outperform by 3x ones that are male dominant. In fact, in companies where 50 percent or more of executives are women, there are reported higher job satisfaction, better work culture, equal and higher pay, and less female employee turnover.
A technical skill is the ability to carry out a task associated with technical roles such as IT, engineering, mechanics, science or finance. A typical technical skill set might include programming, the analysis of complex figures or the use of specific tools.
Technical skills are sometimes referred to as ‘hard skills’ because you can learn how to do them and, in some cases, get qualified or at least certified.
…
Some technical skills employers are looking for include:
