EDUCATION

AI isn’t replacing student writing – but it is reshaping it I’m a writing professor who sees artificial intelligence as more of an opportunity for students, rather than a threat. That sets me apart from some of my colleagues, who fear that AI is accelerating a glut of superficial content, impeding critical thinking and hindering creative expression. They worry that students are simply using it out of sheer laziness or, worse, to cheat. Perhaps that’s why so many students are afraid to admit that they use ChatGPT. In The New Yorker magazine, historian D. Graham Burnett recounts asking his undergraduate and graduate students at Princeton whether they’d ever used ChatGPT. No one raised their hand. “It’s not that they’re dishonest,” he writes. “It’s that they’re paralyzed.” Students se...

Colleges’ Career Success Stats Don’t Tell The Whole Story About How Their Graduates Are Doing After They Get Their Degree. When high school students and their families investigate which college is the best fit, they will inevitably be inundated with various facts and figures. Brochures and websites might highlight the school’s dining halls or student-led clubs and activities. But one of the most important statistics for students and families to consider when choosing a college is the career outcomes of its graduates. This is, perhaps, the greatest selling point for any institution of higher education. Students consistently say that finding a good-paying job is among the top reasons why they go to college. As scholars of career education, we believe it’s important for students and fami...

What would it mean if President-elect Trump dismantled the US Department of Education? In her role as former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, Linda McMahon oversaw an enterprise that popularized the “takedown” for millions of wrestling fans. But as President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, the Trump loyalist may be tasked with taking down the very department Trump has asked her to lead. If Trump does dismantle the Department of Education as he has promised to do, he will have succeeded at something that President Ronald Reagan vowed to do in 1980. Just like Trump, Reagan campaigned on abolishing the department, which at the time was only a year old. Since then, the Republican Party platform has repeatedly called for eliminating the Education ...

Teachers feel most productive when they use AI for teaching strategies. Teachers can use generative AI in a variety of ways. They may use it to develop lesson plans and quizzes. Or teachers may rely on a generative AI tool, such as ChatGPT, for insight on how to teach a concept more effectively. In our new research, only the teachers doing both of those things reported feeling that they were getting more done. They also told us that their teaching was more effective with AI. Over the course of the 2023-2024 school year, we followed 24 teachers at K-12 schools throughout the United States as they wrestled with whether and how to use generative AI for their work. We gave them a standard training session on generative AI in the fall of 2023. We then conducted multiple observations, inter...

College can be confusing for first-generation students – but it doesn’t have to be. In his new book, “Degrees of Risk: Navigating Insecurity and Inequality in Public Higher Education,” sociology professor Blake R. Silver examines some of many ways that college students can slip through the cracks at public colleges and universities. In the following Q&A with The Conversation U.S., Silver expounds on what he discovered while doing research for his book – and how higher education leaders can better serve their students. How are colleges creating uncertainty? Colleges don’t set out to make life complicated for their students, but they often play a direct role in creating and amplifying uncertainty. This is one of the central findings of my new book. Following a period of compa...