Think AI can make your students more curious? Think again!
I probably should have seen it coming. But I didn’t.
I didn’t think anyone would be so tech optimistic to suggest that:
AI should teach kids how to be curious
Question-asking skills can be trained like any other skill
Questioning skills can be evaluated in the same way we evaluate answering skills
When in fact:
Kids know more about curiosity and question asking than any AI (and adult) ever will
Question-asking differs from any other skill in that it is not based on what we know, but on how we deal with what we don’t know
To evaluate something it must be completed, but by asking questions students show that their thinking process is still in progress (a progress the educator is in great danger of short-circuiting by insisting on evaluating the student’s questioning skills)
That’s why I put a big warning sign on a recently published paper titled, “GPT-3-driven pedagogical agents for training children’s curious question-asking skills” (link).
Because the authors seem to suggest all the right solutions to all the wrong problems.
And because educators shouldn’t use AI to make their students more curious.
Rather they should use their own curiosity to understand and unleash the different purposes students have for asking questions.
Like everyone else, students ask questions to:
👩🌾 Explore and express their unique position and perspective
👭 Connect and interact with the people surrounding them
🌍 Understand and contribute to the world they are part of
Asking questions is about so much more than acquiring yet another skill.
I hope - and think - most educators know that.
- This post was written by Pia Lauritzen, PhD who is a founding board member of the Question Collective.