AI in Schools: Cheater or Tutor? | Paul Matthews | TEDxHobart

[Music] [Applause] [Music] I want to introduce you to Jess a year n student from right here in Hobart now Jess is a lovely girl but unfortunately she really struggles at school you see Jess struggles with the basics things like reading and writing math she gets a report card home every year and on it it says she's a approaching the standard but in reality Jess is falling further and further behind with each passing year she really struggles to do her classwork she hates putting up her hand all the time and asking for help and well because

her teachers got 28 other students in the room Jess is slipping between the cracks now friends the thing about Jess's situation is that it's entirely preventable Jesse is struggling right now but we could actually get her to be a high achiever before the years out the research shows us that all we really need for Jess is one-on-one full-time support that's all we need Jess needs a tutor right so if we were able to put our wallets together our heads together maybe we launch a crowdfunding campaign we can get the $80,000 necessary to get Jess a

full-time tutor and that's going to change the shape of her education even her life forever the only catch with that plan is that in Tasmania Jess's struggles struggling with the basics well they're actually really common so if we zoom out from the person and we look at the whole problem actually we don't need to raise $80,000 we need to raise $80,000 lots of $80,000 and I actually I don't fancy our chances of raising 6.4 billion dollars in our crowdfunding campaign so while a one-on-one tter full time support for each of our Tasmanian students well it

would reverse the fortunes of our struggling education system it's unfortunately just not possible this can't be done but what I'm here to tell you today friends is that in a world infused with artificial intelligence we can get many of those same benefits for our students right now and today I'm going to show you how so my name is Paul Matthews and I'm passionate about helping students teachers and school communities not just survive but thrive in a world infused with artificial intelligence so education is in My DNA I'm a third generation teacher and now I help

students teachers and school communities thrive in an AI world and I do that as a speaker I do that as a consultant and I do that as CEO of my teacher a a tech company aimed at bringing userfriendly Ai and putting it in the hands of every teacher so as you can see I'm really sold on the possib abilities of AI and education perhaps as you come here though you're not sold perhaps you're a bit of an AI skeptic maybe you're even a tech skeptic in general you know you not always looking up the reviews

on the latest phones you're not buying the newest watches maybe although you don't publicize it too widely you think you'll get through your life just fine without a smart fridge if that's you I want to tell you that even you friend even you should be excited about artificial intelligence and education and here's a key idea I want you to grab this you should be excited about Ai and education because the impact is much more exciting than the tech the impact is more exciting than the tech the technology things like large language models and machine learning

neural networks if you don't go in for that sort of thing that's fine don't worry about that because I know what does get you excited seeing Jess and the tens of thousands of Tasmanian students like her succeed at school see friends if you get excited at seeing Tasmanian students get better grades have more fun at school and Foster a love of lifelong learning then let me tell you you should be excited about artificial intelligence and education so let me show you one of the key pieces of research that undergirds my optimism for AI and education

so the idea that we could take a struggling student and help turn them into a high achiever that's not just a nice sounding idea it's actually based on one of the seminal pieces of educational research to come out of the 20th century now in 1984 Professor Benjamin Bloom he published a paper called the two Sigma problem now in this paper he set out to find how effective different kinds of teaching was so he compared a conventional class with people who were cheed oneon-one now a conventional class it's what I had it's probably what you had

it's where there's one teacher and 20 or 30 students right and what did Benjamin Bloom find when he compared his conventional class to one-on-one tuted students well this is what he found and you can see it on the graph right there that normally distributed bell curve that was a conventional class it's exactly what you'd expect to see but you can see the curve that's pushed up to the higher end of the scale that's the performance of the tuted students as you can see the tuted students it made an eyew watering difference for them let me

give you two pieces of data to put legs on that first of all if you're at the average tuted student just dead average middle of the cohort you fell above 98% of the conventional class that's an eyeing difference second of all students who were chewed one-on-one on a standardized test they perform two standard deviations higher than the conventional class so as you can see here oneon-one tutoring it makes an eye watering lifechanging two standard deviation difference in a student's life now for those of you who've got your Math's hat on you'll know that a standard

deviation in the math literature is called a sigma it's called a sigma and that's why this paper was entitled the two Sigma problem right two standard deviation increase in learning two Sigma but the real question here is why was it called the two Sigma problem what's the big problem with getting people so much learning well friends the problem is we just can't get those eye watering lifechanging two standard deviation differences for all our students we just don't have the resources so unfortunately for Jess and the tens and thousands of Tasmanian students like her the hypothetical

benefits of that kind of approach well they remain just that hypothetical that's a two Sigma problem but what I'm here to tell you today friends is that in a world infused with artificial intelligence the two Sigma problem has become a two Sigma possibility we can use artificial intelligence right now to put students in a more tailored personalized feedback Rich environment than ever before of course when AI first came out or at least when it hit the mainstream in November 2022 the dominant narrative was that students would use it to cheat I wonder if you heard

that one I certainly I was in a school at the time Educators were running around lighting their hair on fire this is the end of Education this is the death of learning they said and because of that knee-jerk fear response well people just didn't see that actually AI might be exactly what we need for our tied teachers and our struggling students see people just didn't pick up on the fact that maybe we could use this new technology to put our students in a more tailored personalized feedback-rich environment than ever before possible of course AI could

be bad of course it could be used poorly but it could also be fantastic it could also be just what we need and that's why I'm working as hard as I can to make sure AI is a benefit and a blessing to our students and our teachers so today friends I want to give you three simple strategies that we can put into place right now that will have a huge impact on Jess and the tens of thousands of Tasmanian students like her now the interesting thing you'll note about these strategies is they're not brand new

ideas they're not big Innovations they're actually things teachers have been doing for a really long time they're things that I did in my classroom before AI it's a little bit of a window into my vision for artificial intelligence in education it's not about brand new ideas it's about doing the basics better with the AI doing the things that we know work more often for more of our students and that's exactly what you're going to see in these three simple strategies now you know when you engage with AI and you ask it to do something for

you that's called a prompt now I've written up prompts for these three simple strategies that will have a huge impact they didn't fit on my slide so you'll note on my last slide I've actually got a QR code there what I want you to do when that comes up if you're able to scan that that'll be on the last slide you'll be able to download my ebook that contains a simple framework for how you can use AI as well as the prompts for these three simple strategies so let's dive in now and have a look

at some simple strategies that will have a huge impact for Jess and the tens of thousands of Tasmania students like her the first one is text differentiation now that's it's a big phrase but what it means is the teacher adjusting the readability of a text maybe reducing the length or the complexity for people in the class who don't read so well that's text differentiation because you see friends in Jess's year n class there are people reading at a grade n level and that's good there are some people who are reading at a grade seven level

some at a grade five level some at a grade three level so if the teacher is handing everyone the same worksheet and asking them to read it that's what I like to call the spray and pray approach you're just spraying out the same resource to everyone and you're just praying they can read it in a world infused with AI we can do a lot better for our Learners right now it really is as simple as a teacher taking the text that they're going to read in class you plug that into an AI tool like chat

GPT or my teacher ID and you say can you please reduce the length of comple and complexity of this so they bump it down from a grade N9 level to a grade seven level say can you please reduce the length and complexity further bumps it down to a grade five level please reduce this to six simple dot points you've got your grade three version right there it has never been easier to make sure every Learner in our classroom can read what we're asking them to read that's a simple strategy but friends it will have a

huge impact it's not a brand new idea just doing the basics better with AI the second strategy that we can put in place it will have a huge impact is called retrieval practice let me unpack what that means we used to think that teaching a student was all about what you could put in their head it's like stuffing a sleeping bag into a sack just got to put that knowledge in there what we're realizing now is it's not so much about what you can put in although that's really important it's also really important to draw

it out as well you got to draw that knowledge out of the student's head and that process of drawing it out that's called retrieval practice you see much like a student needs to practice an instrument or a sport they actually need to practice their knowledge as well now teachers have always used a really simple quiz for this we use a quiz so you read something and you get quizzed on it great way to practice your knowledge we just don't do it that often because well those quizzes take a long time to create what we can

do now using AI we can allow students to practice their knowledge without the huge time penalty on the teachers it really is as simple as taking the text that you're reading or the transcript of the YouTube video that you're looking at you plug it into an AI tool like chat GPT or my teacher Aid and you say please create me four multiple choice questions four short answer questions four fill-in theblank questions and you've got it right there so we can get our students practicing their knowledge but it's not costing our teachers their evenings weekends and

holidays you see it's a simple strategy but it will have a huge impact it's not a brand new idea it's just doing the basics better with AI the third simple strategy that will have a huge impact is training students to get feedback on their work from artificial intelligence feedback is crucial for anyone who's trying to learn anything right and it's it's a really clear advantage of a one-on-one tutor over a conventional class isn't it one-on-one tutoring it just allows way more space and time for critique or course correction or encouragement as a teacher in a

conventional classroom for many years I know there are going to be some days maybe even some weeks or months where students don't get that tailored personalized feedback from us we can train students so that instead of using AI to do their work for them they can use it to help them with their work so instead of saying write my essay please they can say well here is my essay can you please grade it please give me some feedback about logical coherence and structure and vocab now if you're a teacher out there it's worth saying this

this is not about replacing the teachers absolutely not teachers cannot be replaced I always say to teachers whenever I'm speaking to them AI is not here to take your job it's here to help you do a better job fact of the matter is our students need feedback we're limited to being at one place one time and we can put students in that tailored personalized feedback Rich environment using AI so those are three simple strategies that we could do tomorrow and it would have a huge impact on Jess and the tens of thousands of Tasmanian students

like her but if AI is going to be a benefit and a blessing to us we need to approach it carefully it's not the sort of thing we're going to get right by accident here are two things we have to do first of all teachers need training and they need time off they need high quality professional development and they need time to be able to learn how to use these tools you see AI is the biggest disruption education has ever seen it's bigger than the printing press it's bigger than Co we can't expect Educators to

try and wrap their head around this off the side of their desk right AI can't just be another thing on the long list of things teachers are trying to get done in their spare time we need to give them training and time off to learn how to use these tools second of all we have to train our students to use AI we absolutely have to the reason for that is when it comes to AI use in students it's not a matter of if it's a matter of How It's not if they'll use it of course

they'll use it they're already using it I see it every single day AI is everywhere we can't expect to ban it that horse is bolted or as I say to my students that toothpaste is out of the ch it's out there it can't be put back in it's not a question of if they'll use it it's a question of how will they use it in a way that hurts their education or helps their education it's that same idea that's the title of my talk AI cheater or cheor will it be a benefit or will it

be harmful instead of doing the work for them we can train students to use AI to get feedback on their work and help them in their learning so those are two things we have to do if we're get going to get it right teachers need time off and training we have to show our students how to use it well so friends that's my vision for AI in education it's not about brand new ideas it's about doing the basics better with AI it's about simple strategies that will have a huge impact on Jess and the tens

of thousands of Tasmanian students like her you know that today what talking about Ripple effects let me tell you something that you probably already know education is the meta ripple effect it is a ripple effect that sits above every single other ripple effect because of course it starts in the classroom but it worked its way out into every single facet of society and let me tell you this if we can use AI to do the basics of Education better do the things that we know work more often for more students if we employ these simple

strategies that will have a huge impact we are going to see one of the most powerful and exciting Ripple effects throughout our state our nation and the world thank you