Schools Should Go Back to Basics to Mitigate Effects of AI

Commentary

Odds are, you can’t tell whether this sentence was written by artificial intelligence. Schools across Canada face the same problem. And happily, some are finding simple solutions.

Manitoba’s Franco-Manitoban School Division (Division scolaire franco-manitobaine) recently issued new AI guidelines for teachers: to only assign optional homework and reading in grades kindergarten to 6, and limit homework in grades 7 to 12. The reason? The proliferation of generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT makes it very difficult for teachers, juggling a heavy workload, to discern genuine student work from AI-generated text. In fact, according to the school’s superintendent, Alain Laberge, “Most of the [after-school assignment] submissions, we find, are coming from AI, to be quite honest.”

This problem isn’t limited to Manitoba, of course.

Two provincial doors down, in Alberta, new data analysis revealed that high school report card grades are rising while scores on provincewide assessments are not—particularly since 2022, the year ChatGPT was released. Report cards account for take-home work, while standardized tests are written in person, in the presence of teaching staff.

Specifically, from 2016 to 2019, the average standardized test score in Alberta across a range of subjects was 64 while the report card grade was 73.3—or 9.3 percentage points higher). From 2022 to 2024, the gap increased to 12.5 percentage points. (Data for 2020 and 2021 are unavailable due to COVID school closures.)

In lieu of take-home work, the Franco-Manitoban School Division recommends nightly reading for students, which is a great idea. Having students read nightly doesn’t cost schools a dime, but it’s strongly associated with improving academic outcomes.

According to a Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) analysis of 174,000 student scores across 32 countries, the connection between daily reading and literacy was “moderately strong and meaningful,” and reading engagement affects reading achievement more than the socioeconomic status, gender, or family structure of students.

All of this points to an undeniable shift in education—that is, teachers are losing a once-valuable tool (homework) and shifting more work back into the classroom. And while new technologies will continue to change the education landscape in heretofore unknown ways, one time-tested winning strategy is to go back to basics.

And some of “the basics” have slipped rapidly away. Some college students in elite universities arrive on campus never having read an entire book. Many university professors bemoan the newfound inability of students to write essays or deconstruct basic story components. Canada’s average PISA scores—a test of 15-year-olds in math, reading, and science—have plummeted. In math, student test scores have dropped 35 points—the PISA equivalent of nearly two years of lost learning—in the last two decades. In reading, students have fallen about one year behind while science scores dropped moderately.

The decline in Canadian student achievement predates the widespread access to generative AI, but AI complicates the problem. Again, the solution needn’t be costly or complicated. There’s a reason why many tech CEOs famously send their children to screen-free schools. If technology is too tempting, in or outside of class, students should write with a pencil and paper. If ChatGPT is too hard to detect (and we know it is, because even AI often can’t accurately detect AI), in-class essays and assignments make sense.

And crucially, standardized tests provide the most reliable, equitable measure of student progress, and if properly monitored, they’re AI-proof. Yet standardized testing is on the wane in Canada, thanks to long-standing attacks from teacher unions and other opponents, and despite broad support from parents. Now more than ever, parents and educators require reliable data to assess the ability of students. Standardized testing varies widely among the provinces, but parents in every province should demand a strong standardized testing regime.

AI may be here to stay and it may play a large role in the future of education. But if schools deprive students of the ability to read books, structure clear sentences, correspond organically with other humans, and complete their own work, they will do students no favours. The best way to ensure kids are “future ready”—to borrow a phrase oft-used to justify seesawing educational tech trends—is to school them in the basics.

Paige MacPherson is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.