TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29: "THAT MAKES SENSE" IS NOT THE SAME AS "I UNDERSTAND" Have you ever read an explanation and thought: "Ohhhhh. Yes. That makes perfect sense." Then five minutes later tried to explain it to someone else and discovered that it apparently it did NOT make quite as much sense as you thought. 😂 There is an important difference between recognizing an explanation and being able to reconstruct the understanding yourself. AI may make that distinction increasingly important. Generative AI is extraordinarily good at producing fluent, coherent explanations. And fluency can create a powerful feeling of comprehension, but researchers studying AI-supported learning are beginning to describe a calibration problem: Students can mistake recognition for understanding, fluency for mastery, and coherence for justification. One way to test that is surprisingly old-fashioned. Close the tool. Now explain the idea yourself, give an example, maybe apply it somewhere new, or explain why an alternative answer is wrong. Then, identify what you still don't understand. These are different states of knowledge. That doesn't mean AI explanations are bad. A wonderful explanation can be exactly what helps something click. But perhaps education needs to teach children to ask: "Do I understand this—or do I understand it only while I'm looking at the explanation?" And by the way, don't mistake this scenario as a result of AI being used by students. It's been going on for at least 15-20 years now. Students do often mistake recognition for understanding. If you don't know the fact, information, vocabulary, etc, AND can't USE the information, you do not understand it. Question: Have you ever thought you understood something until you had to explain it yourself? #Tuesday #TuesdayTips #September #Fall #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Education #Learning #Metacognition #CriticalThinking #CognitiveScience #AILiteracy #FutureOfEducation #HumanCenteredAI

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 28: WHO IS DOING THE THINKING? Last week, I kept coming back to one question: What is the work FOR? This week, I want to add another: Who is doing the thinking? Because AI creates an unusual problem for education -- A student can participate in producing something intellectually sophisticated without necessarily possessing the understanding represented by the finished product. That's not an entirely new concern. Remember Cliff Notes? (Yes, I'm Gen X). Students have always copied. Parents have always "helped" too much. Some group projects have always contained one child doing approximately 97% of the work. 😂 There's always been a way to try and shorten, avoid, or bypass some part of the work. I remember reading in college that students in a particular country's universities would remove pages of books in the library, thus making it difficult or impossible for their classmates to read them. But AI dramatically expands the scale and subtlety of the problem. The student may genuinely participate in the back and forth with the AI -- They write the prompt, read the answer, ask for revisions, choose between options, change some words, maybe they even disagree with parts of it. But how much of the underlying reasoning belongs to them? Increasingly, I think we need to distinguish between participating in the production of an answer and possessing the understanding required to produce, explain, evaluate, and defend it. Those aren't necessarily the same thing. And whether we like it or not, some memorization, practicing and recall of facts or information or vocabulary is likely to be necessary. So perhaps one of the simplest tests of AI-assisted learning is: "Okay. Now explain it to me without the AI." Not as punishment, as information. Because if we want to know whether learning occurred, eventually we have to look beyond the artifact and back at the learner. Question: How would YOU tell whether someone genuinely understands something rather than simply recognizing a good explanation? #Monday #MondayMotivation #September #Fall #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Education #Learning #CriticalThinking #Metacognition #AILiteracy #EdTech #FutureOfEducation #HumanCenteredAI