Although artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for quite a long time, educators recently started to express concern that their students would use AI tools to generate their research and other school assignments. This has led some institutions to adopt strict measures against those who rely on AI for their academic work. Plagiarism has always worried educators; however, tools that facilitate plagiarism will only get smarter and more difficult to detect despite the continuous improvement of detection tools. This calls for educators to think of new ways to assess their students’ understanding using assessment tasks that result in outcomes that are solely the students’, instead of outcomes generated by digital tools and programs.
Assessing students’ understanding is an integral component of teaching, as it helps educators know how close (or far) learners are from the intended learning outcomes. This informs teachers about their students’ learning needs, such as what should be retaught or where they need more practice; and who is doing well, and who needs more attention. In addition, assessment serves as feedback to teachers, informing them to modify their teaching methods or pace of instruction. Nevertheless, these benefits are not obtained if the output presented by the learners is not their own creation but wholly or partially the generation of some tool or software.
Authentic assessment methods are countless, and colleges of education address authentic assessment in almost every assessment course. However, educators still heavily rely on traditional forms of assessing their students’ work through pen and paper tests. Students must sit for examinations consisting of multiple choice, essay type, and short answer questions, and they are given tasks such as report and essay writing and research work. Students’ output in response to these tests and assignments can be generated by AI, thus undermining their validity, as they do not test what they should be testing–students’ learning.
Nowadays, with students’ ease of access to artificial intelligence tools, there is a greater risk of plagiarism and students submitting assignments that are generated by such tools. As a result, educators must adapt assessment practices that can inform them about their students’ learning and help them make the necessary decisions related to their teaching practices. This makes it imperative for educators to become more skillful in how they assess student learning. Here are some suggestions that can help in this respect:
- Create tasks that can be assessed by observation of student performance. Learners need to demonstrate their knowledge through performance that can be observed by their peers or teachers. Clear criteria need to be established for observation. A variation to this is that students record their performance and submit their recordings to be viewed and assessed by their peer observers or their teachers.
- Engage students in tasks that require students to collaborate and interact with one another. Afterwards, they have to report on their experience and follow this reporting with open discussion.
- Assign students a task and have them report on it orally to their classmates or to another audience. They can be required to present evidence of their work in the form of photos or videos. Such tasks require teaching students presentation skills and skills of actively and deeply listening to an audience and responding to them.
- Require students to conduct empirical research where they have to collect their own data from interviews, experiments, focus groups, and questionnaires. Here students are required to report their findings and be ready to explain them to an audience or a panel and be ready to respond to their questions.
- Engage students in debates, panel discussions and seminars that require them to prepare their arguments and support them. They will also have to anticipate counter arguments and be prepared to respond to them. Learning how to listen and respond to audience questions is necessary in such types of activities.
- Have students prepare podcasts and videos in which they explain various topics related to their course material. Uploading such material to the school platform can provide an authentic audience for the students’ products.
- Ask students to annotate a piece that is generated by an AI tool while comparing it to their own piece to explain the difference between both pieces. Students may pair up with partners to discuss and annotate their drafts and then submit them along with their final version to be assessed. They might also write a reflection on the whole writing process in which they discuss the differences between the AI writing and their own. They can also explain what they learned about their own writing skills during the process.
Artificial intelligence is here to stay. It will keep getting smarter and will continue to have a deeper understanding of our needs, which will lead to students relying on it more. Thus, educators need to work continuously on improving their AI literacy and to accept it as part of the teaching culture. Some tips for educators would be:
- Make expectations clear to students about how they can and cannot use AI to accomplish their tasks. This should be done early on when the task is assigned, before students start working.
- Work on establishing the culture of assessment for learning rather than assessment for testing and judging. In doing so, the focus of the teacher will be on having students getting closer to the intended learning outcomes instead of focusing on the grades students get. Students will be given multiple opportunities, if needed, to improve their work and become more knowledgeable and skillful.
- Engage students in discussions about what AI can and cannot do and about the ethical aspects related to the use of such tools.
- Encourage students to befriend AI as their study buddy to help expand their knowledge. Model to students how they can resort to AI tools to help them with prompts for their work and to build on what they already know through engaging in discussions about their assignments instead of requesting their whole assignment to be generated.
- Augment student learning with AI instead of suppressing its use in schools.
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