A recent nationally distributed op-ed featured a provocative headline:
Why aren’t we talking about the harm AI is doing to students?
But is that the opinion of education leaders in Riverside and Brookfield about the wave of artificial intelligence that has entered virtually every aspect of society? Well …
“We recently just talked about AI in terms of when we started giving calculators to kids, so, so long ago,” said Kylie Lindquist, assistant principal for curriculum and instruction for Riverside Brookfield High School District 208. “That was like everyone thinking, ‘But they’re not going to be able to do math in their head. We’re giving them calculators and that’s going to cripple them.’ And it was the same thing when we gave kids computers.
“I think AI is capable of doing harm, but I think it’s partially education’s responsibility to teach kids how to work with AI, and how to leverage AI, because it’s not going anywhere. It’s only going to continue to get better.”
Across town, at Brookfield-La Grange Park School District 95, Cathy Cannon has a similar viewpoint about AI tools like ChatGPT.
“I don’t believe it’s doing harm to students,” said Cannon, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning. “I believe harm comes when we don’t teach students to use these tools effectively. I feel like our job is not to ignore it’s there, but to effectively use the tools. We know (students) access it, we know they use it, so it is our job to teach them to use these tools effectively and safely.”
Ditto for Molly Marquardt, director of technology at Riverside School District 96.
“From a generative AI stance, if we take the education piece out, I think it can be (harmful),” Marquardt said. “It is a system that does thinking for us. You can type things in and get an answer. I do think that in an education environment, as long as it is taught in a responsible and appropriate manner, I don’t think it is as harmful as some people understand it to be.”
Tools teachers use to detect AI
Lindquist said Riverside Brookfield High School is awaiting guidance regarding development of an AI policy from the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) that should come around July 1.
However, she said RB has noted in its student handbook that unchecked use of AI for the purpose of plagiarism in doing an assignment that should be a student’s authentic work would be treated in the same way as it would cheating.
She referenced Brisk, a tool teachers can use to not only create materials, but it can also detect large-scale copying and pasting.
“For example, if I’m an English teacher and I gave a research assignment, I can run Brisk and it will show me a time-lapse video of what my student is doing,” Lindquist said. “It has to be done in Google, and we’re a Google Reference district, so that works for us.
“You can see a time-lapse of this document being created. You can see typing if they are typing or pasting in huge chunks of information from other sources.”
Cannon said her district uses the tool GoGuardian, which gives teachers access to all student laptop screens on one screen so they can monitor the work being done. She added the district has been talking about AI for two years and are currently refining an AI policy at the district level.
What’s not allowable with regard to AI?
But where the rubber meets the road, when students are actually at work, what is not allowable for students with regard to AI? In District 95, it’s plagiarism, of course, along with not citing sources and even paraphrasing AI and claiming it as their own. Likewise, submitting AI-generated work as their own is a no-no.
Marquardt confirmed it’s the same at District 96, but the strategy there is not necessarily “catching” students doing something wrong.
It’s educating them.
“We don’t want to say, ‘No, you can’t do this,’ we want to say this shouldn’t be done, and here’s an alternative,” she said.
Lindquist said RB has a progressive discipline policy regarding cheating.
“If we suspect a student is engaged in academic dishonesty, if we have some sort of proof, like if we have Brisk and we’ve looked at it and kind of have some sort of proof, that’s more or less irrefutable,” she said. “At that point, the student gets a zero on the assignment. That’s posted in our policy.
“That’s a first step. When you get into a second and third step that goes with, you can end up failing a course. You can end up being blocked from National Honor Society induction.”
The bottom line, however, is that AI is changing the way students are learning, and it’s happening almost at warp speed, Lindquist said.
“It’s enough to make your head spin a little bit,” she said. “I think we have a lot of people on our staff that are forward thinking and progressive with regard to their use of instructional technology. We have lots of people that are on the cutting edge of leveraging tools for the benefit of students and their colleagues.”