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"New AI tools that can write student essays require educators to rethink teaching and assessment"

6/12/2022

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My friend, Dr. Maylyn Tan, at the Singapore Institute of Management, shared this article in LinkedIn today.

New AI tools that can write student essays require educators to rethink teaching and assessment

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2022/05/17/new-ai-tools-that-can-write-student-essays-require-educators-to-rethink-teaching-and-assessment/

Please take a moment to read the short one-page article. The article includes a paper on learning styles written entirely by an AI program from the prompt, “The construct of ‘learning styles’ is problematic because.” The resulting paper is chilling from the perspective of an educator who is trying to encourage students (especially undergraduate students) to learn to think critically and to write effectively.

In Singapore, we make the students remove and store their watches during exams because they have started using them to communicate and to find answers to exam questions. I’ve abandoned exams for this and other reasons, relying on formative assessments that involve analysis and writing. But what if the students could put a phrase into an application like the GPT-3 tool (https://openai.com/api/) to which this article refers? 

When I began my PhD journey, which followed a 1 ½ years of teaching in China and Vietnam, I wanted to study cheating behaviors. I had not taught a single course section out of seven sections in those first 18 months in which at least one student had not obviously cheated—and in many cases, groups of students, as many as five, for example all handing in the same paper. I was dissuaded by my advisor for good reason—why take on a controversial topic that could interfere with achieving my doctoral degree? Now I am rethinking this topic in the context of pedagogy (e.g., experiential learning methods) and assessment. As an aside, the academic integrity issues have occurred everywhere I have taught, including in: Buffalo, NY; Asheville, NC; and Singapore.
#AcademicIntegrity #LearningToLearn #ExperientialLearning #AssessmentForLearning 
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Learning from experience vs. memorizing

1/5/2020

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​This is a great article. Click the title of the article to go to The Chronicle of Higher Education to read the article.

No Textbooks, No Lectures, and No Right Answers. Is This What Higher Education Needs?
By Beth McMurtrie FEBRUARY 10, 2019 


I use project-based learning methods.
​I have my marketing students work with a local company or non-profit organization (their choice). The end product from the course - usually a segment analysis, or a marketing or promotion plan - is not pre-defined. The students have to figure it out. 
My students get frustrated. I know, because they write about how they didn't get step-by-step instructions in the end-of-year reviews of my teaching. 
The students want detailed, step-by-step instructions. I give them - through lectures, textbook readings, articles, and current new examples - the foundational knowledge that they need to complete their projects. I make myself available to mentor and coach them - to answer any questions they have - every day of the week.
The students have to apply that knowledge to a messy and complicated real-life problem to help a local business owner or non-profit organization manager. That is what they will do after they graduate.
I live with the negative comments in my course reviews because I know they students will benefit in the future.


#highereducation #unca #uncasheville #projectbasedlearning #learningfromexperience #education
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Analyzing Life

7/22/2019

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For my research friends, I'd like to introduce a book that clearly describes the processes involved in analyzing qualitative data. My dissertation chairperson suggested the book: Qualitative research: Analyzing life, Saldaña, J., & Omasta, M. (2017).

As I analyze my research interviews exploring experiential learning at an Asian campus of a large American university, I am finding this new book to be a rich source of guidance. In the past, I have pulled my research method references from several authors, including Saldaña​'s The coding manual for qualitative researchers, and also including Becoming Qualitative Researchers by Glesne (2011), and Interviewing as qualitative research: a guide for researchers in education and the social sciences, by Seidman (2013).

The new Saldaña, J., & Omasta, M. (2017) book is designed as a college qualitative research textbook. It is easy to follow and combines the methods that I have studied elsewhere into one book. For my dissertation, I will mostly refer to this text when I describe my analytic methods, if only to simplify the references. This is worth purchasing (or borrowing from the library) if you are doing any sort of qualitative study.

#qualitativeresearch #qualitativedataanalysis #dataanalysis #
Saldaña #Omasta #experientiallearning

References
Glesne, C. (2011). Becoming qualitative researchers: An introduction (5th ed.): Pearson.
​Saldaña, J. (2015). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (Third ed.): Sage.
Saldaña, J., & Omasta, M. (2017). Qualitative research: Analyzing life: Sage Publications.
Seidman, I. (2013). Interviewing as qualitative research: a guide for researchers in education and the social sciences (4th ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.
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Student Linquistic abilities

6/30/2019

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I am analyzing the interview data I collected from students for my PhD dissertation. Many of these students are amazing, especially in their linguistic abilities.

I'll let this excerpt from the transcript of one interview with a female student speak for itself. The student's name below is a pseudonym.
  • Paul: Okay. Uhm how many languages do you speak?
  • Mary: Four.
  • Paul: What are they?
  • Mary: Portuguese, Japanese, English and Spanish.
  • Paul: Wow!
  • Mary: Hmm.
  • Paul: That’s pretty impressive.
  • Mary: No, I wish I could be fluent in all of them. English and Spanish are the most challenging.
​
​I should add that the student's English during two long interviews was flawless.

#smartstudents

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    This blog summarizes research about active and experiential learning that I have read, and research that I have conducted.

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