Teaching students to 'be better than a robot'
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Can AI be more than just a cheating machine for students?
Can AI be more than just a cheating machine for students? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.
The explosion of AI chatbots that can spit out flawless five-paragraph essays, summarize texts, translate languages, and even in some cases complete multi-step math equations has created a big problem for educators. How do you stop students from cheating or verify that they've learned anything? Some teachers have moved to ban the technology, but others are finding ways to integrate it and teach their students how to be better than the bots.
I'm Christy Gerdherry. I am an associate teaching professor of English and director of the Writing Center at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. So at Babson, I work with an interdisciplinary group of faculty called The Generator. And so The Generator kind of started in fall 2023, and we just started having conversations around how are these tools impacting what's happening in the classrooms, in our daily lives, and We got some modest funding, and so we had over 30 institutions from all around the Boston area that came together for a day. And for the first Tea Party, we had a session on values-based approaches to AI technology. Another session led about leading with like an ethic of care about how AI detectors tend to flag already marginalized students more often.
And then also brought in a panel of students really blowing up notions that it's just a cheating machine. And it's something for us to work through together.
We'll be right back. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. We're back with Christy Gerdhary, a professor at Babson College.
I kind of have a mantra going with my students now, but I always say, like, you have to be better than a robot.
How are educators addressing the challenges posed by AI in the classroom?
We talk about prompt engineering, and I, do you think that that's kind of a misnomer? Like, the engineering part happens somewhere else. Like, that's writing. And I want my students to be able to understand the difference of effective outputs and not effective outputs. So one assignment we do in our first year writing class is called a remediation, where students go back to something they'd previously written, remix it into something new. I had students first just letting AI remediate your work. And the next one was, I want you to collaborate with AI and like literally color code. What's yours? What's the bots? And the third one was, do something that AI can't. And that really stretched students thinking because it seemed like AI could do everything.
But then I started getting these really interesting projects. One student wrote about speaking Bulgarian with her grandmother and it was something about roses and ceramics. And so she like made this clay rose that she painted in our maker space and was able to kind of tell the story in a different way with a physical object.
What are the implications of AI on critical thinking and creativity in students?
And to me, like, that is not loss of critical thinking. Like, we don't see five paragraph essays out in the world. But, you know, there are ways that we can use all the tools we have to help us and make better things happen.
That was Christy Gerdhary, director of the Writing Center and associate professor at Babson College. To hear the rest of our AI economy stories across all our shows, head to marketplace.org.
What innovative strategies are being used to integrate AI into education?
Nicholas Guillaume produced this episode. I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Can AI be more than just a cheating machine for students?
0:01–2:21
2
How are educators addressing the challenges posed by AI in the classroom?
2:21–3:31
3
What are the implications of AI on critical thinking and creativity in students?
3:31–3:58
4
What innovative strategies are being used to integrate AI into education?
3:58–4:35