Enhancing Student Learning with AI — a work in progress!

Earlier this year, I was fortunate to go to Sydney for the Australia/NZ ADE meetup. The focus for this was Artificial Intelligence and we had lots of timely and interesting conversations and workshops. It was very helpful to be a tiny fish in a small pond and learn from passionate experts in the area, as well as have plenty of time and opportunity to ask questions and refine my ideas.

The project that my colleague and I came away with was to create a framework to trial with our NCEA Level 2 (NZ Year 12) classes to help them to use AI to enhance their learning. Many students are already using AI tools, but often in a way which lacks academic integrity, or ineffectively. I also believe that the technology is not going anywhere and we need to learn how to use it, and use it well, to prepare students for the world of work they will be entering. After lots of exploration and discussion, I created a five-step traffic light framework to communicate with students what sort of use of AI is appropriate for an individual task:

 

Although our school AI policy hasn’t been finalised yet, I have started exploring how I can use it as a teacher (and in my personal life!) to familiarise myself with the technology, as well as allowing and/or encouraging its use in the classroom. 

General Discussion/Analogy

When I introduced this framework (above) with my Level 2 students, I firstly asked them what they would ask a personal trainer to do if they had a health and fitness goal. They were able to easily identify that a personal trainer could/should give them a workout plan, demonstrate exercises, offer feedback on form and encourage them, but couldn’t lift the weights for them. We then shifted into a more general discussion about what they should and shouldn’t do with AI if they want to enhance their learning — they were a bit more motivated at this stage in the year because we have finished internals so they only have their external standards left, so they can’t “cheat”! However, I still feel like I have learning to do in this space.

Opening up AI in Formative Assessment

With the help of ChatGPT, I created an AI evaluation scale to assess how effectively students use (or don’t use) AI tools to help them with their work.

 

I then let my Level 2 students use AI however they wanted to support their final Term Order essay, provided they shared their prompts with me, and required them to give a written reflection on how and why they used AI. This was really interesting — the students who are already stronger in the subject gave quite specific prompts and their reflections showed that they used it really purposefully, while weaker students were often using it like a thesaurus (or for a plot summary!). This confirmed my suspicions that, although the students are using AI, they aren’t necessarily using it well and need support and education. However, I’m still getting my head around it myself and am still figuring out how to support them.

AI and Revision Activities

I’ve trialled a few different things to use AI in the revision process as well:

• ChatGPT Challenge — students can use ChatGPT however they want to write an essay on a past exam question, with the aim of writing the “best” one. These are then redistributed and critiqued. This was really interesting. The students were really critical of what their peers produced via AI (I wondered whether the stronger students felt threatened/defensive?) and they learned a lot about its strengths and weaknesses.
• Creating mnemonics — my Level 3 (NZ Year 13) students were struggling to remember the names/order/key facts about Octavian’s battles in his rise to power, so they used AI to create a way to make them more memorable as a quick end-of-lesson activity on a Friday. We then compared and discussed them, and I gave prizes to the “best” ones. When I tested them on the Monday, their recall was much better.
• NotebookLM — I love this tool! It’s such a good way for senior students to consolidate and extend their understanding of a topic, and I think it is especially valuable for Cambridge students since their syllabus is so huge. I divided up the literature themes for both my AS (Year 12) and A2 (Year 13) classes and got them to create a notebook for each one, but had limited time to teach them how to use the tool and asked them to complete it for homework. However, I found again that students need a lot of support and guidance in order to use this tool effectively.

Progress So Far:

With just over a term of actively trying out encouraging the use of AI, I have learned a lot. I’m still getting my head around how to teach the students how to use the technology, when I’m quite new to it myself, but anecdotal feedback from the kids is that they have found some of these activities “fun” and appreciate that I’m being open to the technology. A few things I am still pondering:

1. Google’s Gemini allows you to create custom Gems — I have made essay writing tutors for my NCEA students where all the set up is done so that the AI is working with them to support their essay writing but won’t do the work for them. I think this will help overcome some of the challenges with helping students to use AI effectively and am keen to continue trialling it.
2. Is the framework above still the best one? I almost feel like a three-stage traffic light (no AI, some AI as specified by the teacher, full AI with human evaluation) is better — then we could pick out specific uses of AI (perhaps going back to the nine ideas in the draft policy) from a “menu” depending on the task when we’re on the yellow light.
3. What am I going to do about internal assessments (open-book summative assessments)? How can students make use of the tools available to them while proving that they understand the material in their final submission?

I would be very interested to learn from others who are working on similar goals!