On November 30th, 2022, the company OpenAI released a conversational bot called ChatGPT. The bot responds to questions that users type in by searching large databases and creating well-formed essays, legal briefs, poetry in the form of Shakespeare, computer code, or lyrics in the form of Rodgers and Hammerstein, to name a few. Some educators and commentators fear “The end of high school English”, as students can merely lean on ChatGPT.

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In January this year, the New York City Department of Education took the dramatic step of responding to these fears by blocking access to ChatGPT on all department devices and networks. A department spokesperson justified the decision due to “concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.” She further questioned the educational value of the technology, stating: “While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success.”

“The essays produced by ChatGPT are still identifiable as bot-produced, rather than human-produced.”

The emerging consensus among educatorsopinion writers, and researchers is that teachers and professors might be tricked – that students can submit essays written by the bot. However, the essays produced by ChatGPT are still identifiable as bot-produced, rather than human-produced, due to a few fundamental flaws. A high school English paper that the program composed, for example, was superficial and lacked references. Other reports indicate that the program includes inaccurate information and fails to provide a compelling perspective.

In our own test, I (Kathy Hirsh-Pasek) gave the bot a complicated essay question that I ask my Honors psychology students to answer. It did a respectable job. Yet—the bot produced no more than a B- or C+ essay. Why? To date, the bot cannot distinguish the “classic” journal article in a field that must be cited from any other article that reviews the same content. The bot also tends to keep referencing the same sources over and over again. These are issues that can be easily resolved in the next iteration.

“The bot is more of a synthesizer than a critical thinker.”

More centrally, however, is that the bot is more of a synthesizer than a critical thinker. It would do well on a compare-and-contrast essay, but is less able to create a unique thesis and to defend that thesis.

Creating knowledge transformers

As educators, we strive to make our students what John Bruer, former president of the McDonnell Foundation, dubbed “knowledge transformers”, rather than “knowledge digesters”. That means that we value memorization less than critical thinking. In fact, one of the general problems with many educational systems today is that they value learning the facts more than remembering information over time, generalizing the learning to new situations, and creatively developing a new way of thinking about an issue.

How can we productively use ChatGPT to help our students become knowledge transformers? A writer, a teacher, and an education professor all suggest that ChatGPT could help students write, in the same way that calculators help students in math. ChatGPT has the potential to become an important tool for writers who want to hone their critical thinking skills along with their communication skills.

“ChatGPT has the potential to become an important tool for writers who want to hone their critical thinking skills along with their communication skills.”

How might this happen in practice? Educators are responding with valuable approaches. Adam Stevens, a high school history teacher in New York City who opposes his district’s decision to block ChatGPT, sees it as a valuable tool to promote—not limit—critical thinking. Students can evaluate the program’s initial response to a prompt, then consider how to improve it through revision. Other teachers advocate for a similar approach, and suggest using the program to focus on the writing process.

Deeper, more engaged learning

Many students are likely more sophisticated than their teachers at framing questions and getting solid answers from the bot. They need to learn why—at least for the moment—ChatGPT would get a lower grade than they could get. It is exciting to see how quickly educators are responding to this new reality in the classroom and recognizing the instructional value of ChatGPT for deeper, more engaged learning.

The old education model in which teachers deliver information to later be condensed and repeated will not prepare students for success in the classroom—or the jobs of tomorrow. We should allow that model to die a peaceful death. Used in the right way, ChatGPT can be a friend to the classroom and an amazing tool for our students.

“Used in the right way, ChatGPT can be a friend to the classroom and an amazing tool for our students.”

Footnotes

This is an edited version of a piece originally published by Brookings.

We recently published a book called “Making Schools Work,” which helps educators teach in the way that human minds learn.

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