Curriculum and Instruction

�� study links access to new AP computer science course to a jump in participation, especially among underrepresented students

Carrie Spector — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 18:32:45 +0000

�� study links access to new AP computer science course to a jump in participation, especially among underrepresented students

Carrie Spector Mon, 04/07/2025 - 11:32

The number of students taking an AP computer science exam more than tripled after schools in the study began offering the new course, a �� study finds. Access to the newer course also appears to have a spillover effect, increasing participation in other AP subjects. (Photo: iStock)

Curriculum and Instruction | Race and Equity | Science and Math Education

A college-level option focused on concepts in computing draws more female, Black, and Hispanic students without affecting participation in the original course, �� researchers find.

April 10, 2025

In a bid to engage more U.S. high school students in computer science, the College Board introduced a new Advanced Placement (AP) course in 2016: Computer Science Principles, which explores a range of topics in technology and computation, in contrast to the original AP course’s strict focus on programming skills.

A new study by �� researchers, analyzing changes in the population of students taking AP computer science exams before and after the launch of the alternative course, shows a direct link between access to the course and a sharp increase in participation, with a sizable jump for traditionally underrepresented students.

After schools in the study began offering CS Principles, the number of students taking an AP computer science exam more than tripled overall, the researchers found. Exam counts for female, Black, or Hispanic students more than quadrupled.

What’s more, schools that adopted the new course expanded participation in AP computer science without drawing students away from the original, programming-focused course. Access to the newer course also appears to have a spillover effect, increasing student participation in other AP subjects.

“Computer science education is valuable at so many levels, giving students a set of skills that apply across countless domains,” said Daniela Ganelin, a doctoral student in education data science at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), who coauthored the study with Thomas S. Dee, the Barnett Family Professor of Education at the GSE. “Computing in general, and AI in particular, are so influential right now, and it’s important for students to learn about it so they can understand it, use it responsibly, and be part of guiding its transformation over the course of their careers.”

The analysis, published April 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that access to CS Principles could account for roughly two-thirds of the growth in AP computer science exams taken nationally over the past decade.

“We’re finding a dramatic take-up of academically rich content at the high school level, without crowding out kids from taking the pre-existing course,” said Dee, who is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the �� Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and faculty director of the GSE’s John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities. “This is a rare and compelling example of an educational reform that appears to be driving improvement on a nationwide scale.”

GSE Professor Thomas S. Dee

A reflection of national trends

While the original AP computer science course focuses on teaching students how to write and test code in the Java programming language, the CS Principles course introduces students to programming as well as a wide range of concepts involving computers and technology, with an emphasis on creativity and collaborative problem-solving.

To assess the impact that access to the newer course has had on students’ engagement with advanced-level computer science, the researchers drew on data from all public high schools in Massachusetts – the only state that researchers found publicly provides data on AP participation at the level of detail they sought, separated by subject, school, and student characteristics such as gender and ethnicity.

Massachusetts is a state with an unusually high AP participation rate to begin with, the researchers noted. “Because Massachusetts leans into AP so much, you might expect to see more of an effect there,” Ganelin said. “On the other hand, if the state is well saturated with AP already, you might expect more dramatic effects in other states where the room for growth is higher.”

The state’s overall growth in AP exam-taking during the time period of the study mirrors trends in national data, the researchers said, which points toward the generalizability of their findings.

GSE doctoral student Daniela Ganelin

The researchers drew on data from the state’s nearly 300 traditional public high schools over a 15-year period, from the 2006-07 school year through 2020-21. They found that after a school introduced CS Principles, its exam count in any AP computer science course jumped by an estimated 16 exams, more than tripling participation for the average school that adopted the course.

Analyzing the uptake for different demographic groups, the study found that the number of AP computer science exams taken by female, Black, or Hispanic students more than quadrupled: average female exam counts went from a baseline of 1.3 exams per school to about 6, while average exams for Black or Hispanic students went from 0.7 to about 3.

The new exams were concentrated in CS Principles, with no statistically significant drop in students taking the exam for the original AP computer science course.

The study also found that the initial spike after the course’s introduction was followed by further growth over time, a trend the researchers said suggest that factors supporting students’ participation – like staff capacity, the quality of the class, and awareness among students – strengthened after the course was adopted. That could be due in part to the standardization of content within the AP program, they said.

“When you have an intentionally designed course that’s being offered in a relatively similar way throughout the country,” said Dee, “it creates better opportunities for supporting teachers’ capacity to deliver that content effectively, as well as student-focused learning supports.”

The College Board has released descriptive findings in the past indicating similar patterns of growth, but the independent study by the �� researchers goes further to support a cause-and-effect relationship between increased participation and the introduction of CS Principles in individual schools.

A spillover effect

In addition to expanding participation in AP computer science, the launch of the new course appeared to boost engagement in other AP subjects. The study found that after introducing CS Principles, a school’s total AP exam count grew by an estimated 33 yearly exams, representing a 9% increase for the average adopting school.

The gains were concentrated particularly in AP Environmental Science and English Language and Composition, which the study noted often serve as introductory college-level courses for their respective subject areas.

“I can imagine a situation where students taking one AP course might say, ‘I felt successful here,’ and want to take more in other subjects,” said Ganelin, a former computer science teacher and curriculum specialist. “Or where a school might say, ‘We’re having success in getting kids from a variety of backgrounds into this AP course. Let’s see if we can encourage them to take others as well.’ ”

Given the advantages AP courses offer in preparing students for college and the ongoing challenge schools face in recruiting computer science teachers, the researchers said the AP program’s standardized approach offers a promising model with economies of scale.

“There was a lot of work involved upfront in putting this course together, but now, if you’re a principal or a teacher who wants to bring computer science to your school, this option exists,” Ganelin said. “There are curriculum materials out there, there are training resources for teachers, so any principal can bring it to their school. And what we’re seeing is that there’s a good chance that if you offer it, kids will come. There will be take-up across demographic groups.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Thomas S. Dee

U.S. textbooks portray Asians in a limited and negative light, new study shows

Carrie Spector — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 18:48:28 +0000

U.S. textbooks portray Asians in a limited and negative light, new study shows

Carrie Spector Thu, 03/27/2025 - 11:48

A new study uses artificial intelligence to analyze the portrayal of Asians and Asian Americans in widely used U.S. history textbooks. (Photo: iStock)

Civics and History | Curriculum and Instruction | Race and Equity

In an analysis of widely used U.S. history textbooks, �� education scholars find that the rare mentions of Asians and Asian Americans largely use language related to war.

March 31, 2025

By Carrie Spector

Despite the instrumental role Asians have played in developing American infrastructure and institutions, they are rarely mentioned in popular U.S. history textbooks, according to a new study co-authored by �� researchers. Even the infrequent references tend to portray Asians and Asian Americans in a negative light, the study finds, largely in the context of war as enemies and outsiders.

Researchers used artificial intelligence to analyze each word and sentence of 30 of the most widely used U.S. history textbooks in California and Texas high schools, two states that have the highest student populations in the United States and make up the largest markets for textbook publishers.

They found that only 1 percent of sentences in the textbooks contained any mention of Asians or Asian Americans. Most of the references were related to war and foreign affairs, rather than their contributions to U.S. society.

“There’s very little discussion about Asian Americans in these textbooks, which is especially surprising for states like California and Texas, which have a huge Asian American population,” said Minju Choi, PhD ’25, who co-led the study as a doctoral student at the GSE and is now a postdoctoral research fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center in Germany.

Minju Choi, PhD '25

The study also found that the sentiment of verbs used to describe Asians was markedly negative, more so than the language used to describe actions of other ethnic groups. Specifically, the researchers identified the prevalence of words like attack, invade, and threaten in connection with Asians, in contrast to verbs like begin, want, and believe used in connection with groups like Germans and the British.

“The disparity is shocking,” said Patricia Bromley, an associate professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the �� Doerr School of Sustainability. “For Asian groups, not only did we see the dominance of the war narrative, but the language is much more aggressive, more negative. The negative sentiment is higher for Asian groups relative to other social groups, in sentences related to war and in non-war contexts.”

The study, published March 27 in the journal Educational Researcher, was co-led by Lucy Li, who earned her bachelor’s and a master’s degree in computer science from �� and is now a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley. David Bamman, an associate professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, is also a coauthor.

A disproportionate focus on war

While war is commonly a centerpiece in U.S. history textbooks, the researchers said, they found that the emphasis on war was far greater for Asians than for other ethnic groups. More than 45 percent of sentences mentioning Asians or Asian Americans were focused on war or conflict, compared with about 14 percent of sentences in the textbooks overall.

“That focus obscures the social history of Asians and Asian Americans, the complicated history of migration and other transnational experiences as they’re linked to militarism,” said Choi. “It also perpetuates the stereotype of Asian Americans in history as the foreign enemies.” The emphasis on “fighting” verbs in connection with Asians oversimplifies their roles into either aggressors or victims, she said.

GSE Associate Professor Patricia Bromley

The researchers also gave examples of Asians who had an important role in the history of the United States but were rarely or not mentioned in the textbooks. For one, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1898 brought about by Chinese American Wong Kim Ark helped to establish birthright citizenship for anyone born within U.S. territory, but only one textbook in the study sample included a reference to his case. None of the textbooks mentioned Japanese American Yuri Kochiyama, an activist who played a significant part in the U.S. civil rights movement.

When historical figures were named in sentences mentioning Asians or Asian Americans, nearly two-thirds of the individuals who were named were white, the researchers found. This sentence, for example – “In fact, because most Japanese people had never seen steamships before, they thought the ships in Perry’s fleet were ‘giant dragons puffing smoke,’ ” – refers only to Matthew Perry, a white American naval commander, by name.

“Asians and Asian Americans are reduced to groups and treated quite monolithically, versus the white figures, who get to be heroic actors with power and agency as individuals,” said Bromley.

The study also found that most mentions of Asian Americans were limited to Chinese and Japanese Americans, excluding groups such as South or Southeast Asians. Filipino Americans are the third-largest Asian American group, Choi noted, but rarely appeared in the textbooks except in the context of the U.S. annexation of the Philippines.

Using AI to analyze words and sentences

The study builds on past textbook analyses led by Bromley and her collaborators, investigating how U.S. textbooks characterize different population groups such as men, women, and people of color, as well as how political movements and climate change are represented.

For this study, like some of the previous work, the researchers analyzed each word and sentence in the textbooks using natural language processing (NLP), a form of artificial intelligence that enables computers to recognize and understand text. One popular NLP method, known as topic modeling, identified the prevalence of certain topics in sentences that mention Asians and Asian Americans. Another, known as dependency parsing, identified verbs associated with Asians and Asian Americans, to analyze actions ascribed to them in the textbooks.

The researchers did not find meaningful differences between the California and Texas textbooks in terms of the prevalence and nature of references to Asians and Asian Americans, but noted that the use of computational methods to identify general patterns might not reveal more nuanced differences in ideology between the two states’ books.

For educators, the researchers suggested that supplementing textbooks with more inclusive materials could provide a broader perspective on the historical portrayal of Asians in the United States. They recommended lesson plans and teaching resources from the �� Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education for more representative accounts.

The limitations of existing textbooks can also provide a springboard for discussing the implications of their depiction of Asians, Bromley said. “It can be a chance to point out the omissions and the language used, to reflect with students on the meaning and creation of narratives of American national identity.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Patricia Bromley

Tackling a math problem

Carrie Spector — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 23:48:13 +0000

Tackling a math problem

Carrie Spector Tue, 11/19/2024 - 15:48

A �� study found that ninth graders who struggled in math but took Algebra 1 with peers at grade level went on to earn higher test scores than students who had been placed into a remedial course. Teachers were also equipped through an intensive program to support all students in a mixed-level classroom. (Photo: Allison Shelley for EDUimages)

Curriculum and Instruction | Research and Practice | Science and Math Education

�� scholars work with a Bay Area school district on a novel approach to algebra instruction that yields academic gains for struggling students.

November 21, 2024

By Carrie Spector

For high schoolers, there’s a lot riding on whether they pass Algebra 1 by the end of ninth grade. Students who fail the course are unlikely to meet college admissions requirements by the end of their senior year, and they’re less likely than others to graduate at all.

One school district in San Mateo County, Calif., is taking a novel approach to support students struggling in math. Instead of being put on a remedial track, those who enter ninth grade below grade level join their peers who are already at grade level in the same Algebra 1 classroom — with teachers who’ve been equipped through an intensive training program to help them all improve.

A study of the initiative, which was piloted at the Sequoia Union High School District (SUHSD) through a randomized controlled trial, showed that ninth graders in mixed Algebra 1 classes who entered below grade level went on to do substantially better on 11th grade math tests than their peers who were placed into a remedial course.

The study found that the initiative also increased attendance, the likelihood of staying in the district for all four years, and take-up of other college-ready math courses for the students who struggled initially. There was no indication of negative effects for the students who were at grade level in the mixed groups.

“We’ve had highly contentious debates about math pathways that simply accelerate or decelerate students, but much less attention on supporting teacher practice in ways that might broaden our sense of what’s possible,” said Thomas Dee, the Barnett Family Professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), who conducted the evaluation with Elizabeth Huffaker, PhD ’24, now a research fellow at the GSE. “This study is a nationally relevant proof point of what high expectations and instructional differentiation in the classroom can achieve.”

Rethinking placement policies

The district, which serves a diverse body of nearly 9,000 students across four high schools, began re-examining its math placement policies in 2018 as part of a larger effort to promote critical thinking and collaborative skills, and to address achievement gaps across the curriculum.

“We wanted to create problem-solving classrooms where you can walk in and see students grappling with big ideas, and where they’re able to communicate their reasoning,” said Victoria Dye, executive director of curriculum, instruction, and professional development at SUHSD. “And crucially, we wanted to remove the racial and socioeconomic predictability of ninth-grade math placements.”

Enrollment in advanced high school math courses is highly stratified by race and socioeconomic status, with evidence showing that Black, Hispanic, and poor students complete fewer college-prep classes than their white, Asian, and affluent peers.

Since 2016, the GSE has partnered with nine San Mateo County school districts through the ��-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative, conducting research on various educational challenges and opportunities. At the start, researchers at the GSE’s John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities built a massive database to track student outcomes from elementary to high school, bridging gaps in knowledge about students’ progress from one level of schooling to the next.

The data archive makes it possible for all nine districts to see students’ experiences across districts and over time, and it allows researchers to study learning patterns and factors that predict different academic outcomes.

GSE Professor Guillermo Solano-Flores

For SUHSD’s math initiative, researchers were able to study links between math course pathways and other measures, such as how students scored on state exams and whether they were able to complete college-eligible math courses. A project led by GSE Professor Guillermo Solano-Flores studied the paths taken by English learners (ELs) in particular — especially long-term English learners (LTELs), or students classified as ELs for more than six years.

Different combinations of the math courses offered could result in about 80 possible trajectories — a number of which would leave students falling short of college admission standards, despite satisfying their high school graduation requirements. Solano-Flores and his team found that LTELs were significantly underrepresented in trajectories that would make them eligible for competitive colleges, even if they had already taken Algebra 1 in middle school.

The discrepancy between graduation requirements and college entry standards is often not clear to students and their families, especially those from other cultures, Solano-Flores said. “In Latin American and other countries, if you pass your mandated math courses in high school, you’ll be eligible for college. You don’t need to take extra classes to become eligible.”

Solano-Flores’ team recommended expanding efforts to communicate with families, especially with visual and interactive tools, to make sure multilingual students understand the consequences of certain course paths. SUHSD is now piloting a web-based dashboard that shows parents whether their student is on track for graduation and college readiness.

The researchers also raised concerns about national assessments used partly to inform ninth-grade placement decisions, because the tests weren’t designed for that purpose and, given the time it took for the district to receive the results, were administered about a year before the students entered high school.

“A lot can change in nine or ten months,” said Solano-Flores, who recommended the district use tests based on its own curriculum and population, timed more closely to the start of ninth grade.

His team also recommended more heterogeneous classrooms that combined students with different levels of English proficiency across math courses. This would provide more opportunities for ELs to simultaneously develop English and learn mathematics, Solano-Flores said.

GSE Professor Thomas Dee

Raising the floor and adding supports

The district piloted the Algebra 1 initiative in the 2019-20 school year, addressing the concerns Solano-Flores and his team raised about the placement test and class composition while making advanced pathways more accessible to all students, including ELs.

The initiative “raised the floor” by eliminating remedial algebra for students in the treatment arm of the study and implementing a robust preparation program for those teachers. (Ninth graders who entered high school above grade level had completed Algebra 1 in middle school; they were placed in geometry and not affected by the initiative.)

To start, teachers participated in two week-long intensive trainings over the summer with the district’s instructional coach and outside consultants. During the year, the teachers received on-site coaching, had an extra planning period each day to prepare for the mixed-level class, and met regularly as a cohort to learn and practice instructional strategies for “teaching at the speed of learning,” to help all students in differentiated classrooms improve.

“This study is a nationally relevant proof point of what high expectations and instructional differentiation in the classroom can achieve.”

Thomas Dee
Professor, �� Graduate School of Education

GSE Research Fellow Elizabeth Huffaker, PhD ’24

Many of the students in the study who initially tested below grade level in middle school matriculated to geometry in tenth grade, which wouldn’t have even been an option had they been in the remedial algebra class. Some students in the treatment arm did have to repeat Algebra 1 in tenth grade.

“This was a very challenging course for them, much more rigorous material than they would’ve been exposed to in the pre-algebra course,” Huffaker said.

But by the end of 11th grade, students from the mixed-level Algebra 1 classes were 14 percent more likely than those in the control group to have completed Algebra 2, the next step toward college readiness.

When preliminary data showed progress for struggling students without any negative impact on the others, the district ended the randomization after one year and implemented the initiative for all students, extending the professional development program to all math teachers.

The district also worked with a consultant to develop a new math readiness assessment. Because the remedial course has been eliminated, the district no longer requires a placement test for students to enroll in Algebra, said Diana Wilmot, director of research and evaluation at SUHSD. “But we wanted to make sure we still could identify the kids who need more support, so we can allocate funding in a targeted way and for classroom composition, to ensure a heterogeneous group.”

The findings on improved attendance and students’ likelihood of staying in the district are consistent with other studies on school initiatives that promote a sense of belonging, the researchers said.

“Our teachers worked hard to disrupt the existing patterns of status that exist in the classroom,” Dye said.

As district leaders continue to track the effects of the initiative, the researchers expressed hope that the findings will draw attention to other dimensions of math policy beyond detracking.

“So much of the contentious math discourse is stuck on this ‘accelerate for all’ or ‘decelerate for all’ binary,” said Dee. “This research suggests that also being attentive to instructional core can be really impactful and unlock some of the false tensions that reductive framing has created for us.”

Guillermo Solano-Flores is also a faculty affiliate of the �� Accelerator for Learning. Thomas Dee is also the faculty director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, and a senior fellow at both the �� Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Hoover Institution.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Thomas S. Dee , Guillermo Solano-Flores

Teaching ethnic studies: Four takeaways from �� education conference

Carrie Spector — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 17:49:40 +0000

Teaching ethnic studies: Four takeaways from �� education conference

Carrie Spector Fri, 10/18/2024 - 10:49

(Photo: Allison Shelley for EDUimages)

Curriculum and Instruction | Race and Equity | Teaching

The RILE program brought together researchers and educators to forge a path for statewide implementation of ethnic studies.

October 17, 2024

By Isabel Sacks

Starting next academic year, high schools across the state of California must offer ethnic studies courses, and they will be a graduation requirement starting with the class of 2030. In a large and diverse state with nearly 2 million secondary students, districts are working on – and sometimes struggling with – how to effectively bring the coursework into their schools and create meaningful and high quality lessons that enrich and benefit students.

The 2024 annual conference of the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE) program at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) addressed this issue through a multi-day convening, “Exploring Ethnic Studies: A Collaboration Research & Training Event for Everyone.” The conference aimed to support California educators, administrators, and districts to implement the ethnic studies mandate, and featured two days of virtual panels with researchers and practitioners, followed by two days of in-person teacher professional development workshops with the Khepera Curriculum Group.

For the first time, the �� Accelerator for Learning was a collaborator on the event, having initiated a seed grant exploring new approaches to ethnic studies earlier this year as part of its Equity in Learning initiative. Ethnic studies is an interdisciplinary approach to learning about the histories, experiences, and cultures of marginalized groups that emerged from student activism in the 1960s. Research by Tom Dee, a professor at the GSE, has shown both short and long-term academic benefits of an ethnic studies program in San Francisco, leading to adoption of an ethnic studies mandate in the state.

While ethnic studies is a contentious topic in education, the conference sparked honest discourse between researchers, curriculum developers, classroom teachers, and teacher educators and raised key questions to consider as the subject is implemented in schools statewide.

Some insights from the conversations:

1. Ethnic studies can be transformative for students and society.

Eujin Park, an assistant professor at the GSE and faculty affiliate of the Accelerator, took her first ethnic studies course as an undergraduate. “It was revelatory and transformative, and gave me a new language and a new framework to understand my own experience and that of others,” she said. “It shaped the rest of my four years in college and the trajectory of my career and research.”

As a high school teacher for more than a decade in San Jose and East Palo Alto, where her students are largely Latino, Irene Castillon, MA '10, witnesses the benefit to her students of learning Mexican-American history. “I see engagement and love for learning, and there is a lot of question-asking,” she said of her students, crediting the connection of the course to student identities. She noted that students in these courses brought in stories of their lives and their families, and went above and beyond because they wanted to, not just for the sake of a grade.

“One of the most powerful impacts of ethnic studies is that it can create humanizing spaces in classrooms and in our society,” she said, and shared that several of her former students have now become ethnic studies teachers themselves, pointing to the multigenerational impact of the approach.

Albert Camarillo, a professor emeritus of history at ��, is widely regarded as one of the founding scholars of the field of Mexican-American and Chicano Studies. He reflected on his decades of experience teaching ethnic studies at the college level to students who rarely had access to these types of courses in high school.

“When you provide this information to students who are open-minded and thirsting for this knowledge, they are listening intently,” he said. “We can see today how race is still such a dividing idea used to drive fear and anxiety in the hearts of a lot of Americans. Don’t we as educators have a fundamental commitment to provide a basis for our students to be able to understand each other?”

Albert Camarillo, a professor emeritus of history at ��. (Photo: Linda A. Cicero / �� News Service)

2. Ethnic studies cannot be taught in a silo; it must draw upon students’ realities.

Several panelists expressed concern about the challenge of implementing ethnic studies successfully across the diversity of school settings in California, and highlighted the importance of ethnic studies courses that reflect students’ lived experiences, family backgrounds, and communities.

Tony Green, a 30-year veteran social studies teacher at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland, has developed and taught Black Studies courses for years, drawing upon local history and community.

“In the East Bay, there is a rich legacy of Black community and I try to bring in elders as the foundation of the class,” he said. “They are a primary source to tie into African American history. Allowing community involvement builds on the richness of the content.”

Green has taken his students to see Bobby McFerrin as part of a lesson on the oral tradition of West Africa, leads an annual field trip to Marcus Books, the oldest Black-owned bookstore in the United States, and invites his students’ families to class to share their stories. “The more I bring in the community, the more the content and pedagogy changes,” he said.

Park sees potential for ethnic studies to make schooling more responsive to marginalized students and communities. “What happens when their knowledge and experiences become centered the way that ethnic studies demands that we do? What would it look like to seriously engage the funds of knowledge that communities hold? How can that transform California’s K-12 schooling?” she asked.

3. Teacher preparation and self-reflection are crucial in the implementation of ethnic studies.

Rita Kohli, an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), coordinates the ethnic studies pathway of the university’s teacher education program. Her work has focused on building and strengthening the racial literacies of teachers, especially teachers of color. Kohli noted that between 85-90% of teacher preparation faculty are white, and traditionally, teacher certification programs talk little about race. However, this fall, every incoming teacher candidate at UCR will take the ethnic studies pathway course.

“Teacher education programs need to grow and be responsive – the ethnic studies pathway is a possibility for this to happen,” said Kohli. “But it will take the willingness of teacher prep program leaders, districts, and schools to grow in their understanding of ethnic studies.”

She also noted the danger of ethnic studies teachers, particularly teachers of color, being held responsible for all social justice and diversity work in their schools, which she has seen become stressful and draining for teachers she’s worked with. “What are the things we can do to invest in everyone’s racial literacy?” she posed to the group.

Castillon shared what it’s taken for her to become a successful teacher of ethnic studies. “Ethnic studies is the merging of the hearts and minds, and I think about ethnic studies as ‘a work of heart,’” she said. “Teaching is sometimes go-go-go. But it’s important to have pause moments to include families and the community to do this work.”

She cited self-reflection and consideration of identity and positionality as key. “Before teaching ethnic studies, teachers need to consider, ‘Who am I? What is my story? What do I need to learn and unlearn?’”

4. Researchers are key collaborators in developing ethnic studies programming.

Antero Garcia, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty affiliate of the Accelerator, is coordinating the Accelerator’s seed grant that funds new research on how to teach ethnic studies across school contexts. He described some of the in-progress research projects and reflected on the role of universities in supporting the implementation of California’s ethnic studies mandate.

“When it comes to setting our research agendas in academia, we need to consider: who does our work reach? How does it improve teacher practice? Who does this work benefit?” he said. Garcia urged researchers to consider both their research methods and dissemination to be most useful in classrooms. “If ethnic studies is about uplifting these communities we have worked with for years, do the ways we communicate that work fulfill that promise?” he asked.

Camarillo echoed that higher education needs to support ethnic studies implementation in high school, saying, “Ethnic studies is already being offered and is successful at universities in a lot of places, and collaborations between districts and universities are being established across the state.” He called upon both high school teachers and researchers to seek out and invest in these collaborations. “It’s a larger educational movement.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Antero Garcia , Eujin Park

Lessons in learning: �� education students partner with community groups to create teaching tools

Olivia Peterkin — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 19:40:45 +0000

Lessons in learning: �� education students partner with community groups to create teaching tools

Olivia Peterkin Fri, 06/07/2024 - 12:40

Jacob Ramirez (left), MA '23, who manages the GSE Makery, took the course on curriculum construction last winter and continues to work with the Sunnyvale, Calif., organization he partnered with for his project. (Photo: Joleen Richards)

Curriculum and Instruction | Students | Teaching

In a course on curriculum construction, Graduate School of Education students craft strong curriculum for local organizations.

June 10, 2024

By Olivia Peterkin

At the beginning of her course on curriculum construction, Denise Pope presents her students with a few random objects: a French textbook, a visitors’ guide to the zoo, a college syllabus, and a Sesame Street script, before asking: Which of these is curriculum?

That question sets the tone for the rest of the course, where students explore what makes for a good curriculum, how to develop one, and who it benefits. The course — originally taught by Decker Walker, a professor emeritus at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), and reimagined by Pope, who took the course as a GSE doctoral student some 30 years ago — has provided generations of students with applied learning opportunities, while providing community partners with lesson plans that bolster their goals.

“A curriculum must convey the why, what, and how of all that is to be delivered to a learner,” said Pope, a senior lecturer at the GSE, who has taught the course for the past 25 years. “The why is the purpose or intent, the what is the content, and the how is the delivery or pedagogy.”

Throughout the quarter, she said, students come up with their own definition of curriculum and work with a community partner to make sure that they are delivering the type of learning plan that meets the organization’s needs.

Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the GSE, has been teaching the course on curriculum construction for the past 25 years.

Digging in deep

In the course, Pope covers curriculum theory, design, and the politics of curriculum construction to build a baseline understanding of the concepts students need to form curricula of their own.

They discuss topics such as the value of student involvement, hands-on learning, and the democratization of knowledge — which are applied in class projects and modeled in the class through Pope’s own curriculum.

“I think Denise does a really great job of objectively presenting information and allowing you to form your own perspective,” said Jacob Ramirez, MA ‘23, who took the course as part of his coursework in the International Comparative Education (ICE) program and currently manages the GSE Makery. “Theory does have value, but putting it into practice is the best way to develop your own perspective. This class was one of the first times where I saw theory really come to life.”

For Ramirez’s course project, his group created a high school summer camp curriculum for Maker Nexus, a community maker space in Sunnyvale, Calif.

“For us, it came down to thinking about how we can make a fun and engaging course that students are going to come back to day after day and actually enjoy,” said Ramirez, who still works with Maker Nexus as an instructor teaching industrial embroidery, and with its education team to develop a curriculum for Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall.

“It was really cool to be able to work with them in the course to learn, but to then return and work with them again has been pretty amazing,” he said.

A foundation built on community

Community involvement is a pillar for the curriculum construction course, which leans heavily on partnerships outside of �� so students can work on projects that will be used in the real world.

“What makes the course really impactful for community partners is that there’s a clear timeline about what students will be able to accomplish, so partners can go in with a clear goal,” said Paitra Houts, MA ‘08, director of community engaged learning at Haas Center for Public Service, who took the course when she was a student in the GSE’s Policy, Organization and Leadership Studies (POLS) program.

“Not only is the course project meeting student needs, it’s meeting a community need, and building a network of learners and educators,” she said.

As part of the course, students have created a variety of curricula — for example, a training guide on how to use a robot in vascular surgery, a curriculum that teaches medical students how to employ culturally sensitive nutrition practices, financial literacy resources for people learning about the mortgage process, and a curriculum for higher education leadership courses for the Ministry of Education in Brazil.

“One of the big lessons in the course is that curriculum construction is contextual and value-laden, and can be used as a lever for change,” Pope said. “When my students are working with people on a site, they’re letting them know why they’re designing lessons in a certain way and what learning theories are being used, while respecting the expertise of the community members as co-designers.”

A framework shaped by applied learning

Tracie Benally, who took the course this winter, said the experience has had a huge impact on her career aspirations.

“It was extremely useful to understand the most basic fundamentals about how the academy perceives curriculum,” said Benally, a former high school teacher who graduates from the POLS program in June.

“Having come out of the classroom and being a little pessimistic, what excited me the most about the course was learning the principles of what types of questions to ask, and digging back to the point of teaching and why we should be invested in teaching well.”

After graduating, Benally would like to help develop legislation related to curriculum and assessment on Capitol Hill, with a focus on Native American education.

The course was challenging, she said. “But that is what set me on fire. I needed that culture, and I needed her to expect improvement in order to do the work well.”

At the end of the course each quarter, students showcase their completed curricula at an event welcoming members of the GSE, partner sites, and the broader community.

“There are two parts I love about attending the celebration every year,” said Houts. “One is just seeing what all gets developed — the quarter is so short, but students really run with this material in a deep and well thought-out way.

“Second is seeing the energy the community partners have around the curriculum that gets developed, which excites me the most,” she said.

This year’s curriculum celebration featured, among others, a project to aid undocumented U.S. high school juniors and seniors in pursuing higher education, a tool for seventh graders that teaches about healthy emotions, and a community archive for elementary students in East Palo Alto, among others.

“Capping everything off with the celebration on the last day honors their work, but it’s also helpful if you're, say, a middle school teacher looking for how to implement virtual field trips. You could come in and learn about it there at the celebration,” said Pope, referencing another one of this year’s projects.

“I love how it all comes together at the celebration, and the appreciation from the community partners who get excited,” she said. “It’s a real service that we’re offering.”

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Changing the history course

Carrie Spector — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 23:00:18 +0000

Changing the history course

Carrie Spector Sun, 02/25/2024 - 15:00

Students in Salinas, Calif., participate in lessons using the Reading Like a Historian curriculum developed by the �� History Education Group, which recently launched as the Digital Inquiry Group, an independent nonprofit. (Photo: Manol Manolov)

Civics and History | Curriculum and Instruction | Impact

The �� History Education Group revolutionized the way students learn about the past. Now it’s moving into a new era.

February 27, 2024

By Carrie Spector

When Sam Wineburg joined the faculty of �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) in 2002, he knew he wanted to pursue a different approach to the way K-12 schools teach history. Instead of having students memorize names and facts from a textbook, why not equip them to investigate the evidence for themselves, just as historians do?

His own research had shown that with the appropriate guidance, even fifth and sixth graders could work with documents like diaries, speeches, and works of art to explore questions about the past. And as the world’s mode of delivering information was becoming increasingly digital, he knew that teaching students how to scrutinize sources would be critical beyond the history classroom — they were skills for becoming informed citizens in a democratic society.

His groundbreaking approach became the premise of the �� History Education Group (SHEG), an organization that has become renowned for its innovative, research-based approach to teaching history and, more recently, digital literacy. Over the past two decades, the group has created a rich repository of lessons for different grade levels, all freely available on its website, and partnered with school districts around the world to help educators use the materials in their classroom.

To date, SHEG’s resources have been downloaded more than 16 million times by educators from all 50 states and from countries around the world. Forty-one state departments of education in the United States include its materials on recommended lists. UNESCO bestowed the organization with an award for its work communicating best practices in media literacy in 2020, and a California law that went into effect last month requiring media literacy instruction in schools cited SHEG’s research in its rationale for the legislation.

Now SHEG is moving into a new era as the Digital Inquiry Group (DIG), an independent nonprofit that launched this month.

“Our main objective has always been to create materials for the classroom that are easy to use and go beyond the single voice of the textbook,” said Wineburg, the Margaret Jacks Professor Emeritus of Education at ��, who founded both SHEG and its new incarnation, DIG. “We’ve made a few bets, trying to figure out where we’d have the most influence with limited resources. But with all of our research and all of the resources we’ve developed, it’s always been about empowering students to make sense of the past and the present.”

Incubating a new approach at ��

The book Reading Like a Historian, published shortly after the authors developed the curriculum, shows how to apply the approach to middle and high school classrooms.

Back in 2002, before there was a SHEG, Wineburg launched his approach in a course for prospective high school teachers in the �� Teacher Education Program (STEP).

“STEP was really a laboratory for developing these new teaching methods,” said Wineburg, who piloted curriculum materials he developed with his first two teaching assistants, Chauncey Monte-Sano, PhD ’06, and Daisy Martin, PhD ’06. (Monte-Sano is now a professor of education at the University of Michigan, and Martin directs the History & Civics Project at the University of California at Santa Cruz.)

The document-based curriculum his team created, called Reading Like a Historian, introduced students to historical thinking, a set of skills historians use to analyze and understand historical events in context. Using primary sources designed to be accessible at different grade levels, students investigate questions about history: Did enslaved people build the Great Pyramid at Giza? Why did U.S. senators oppose joining the League of Nations in 1919? Was Social Security revolutionary, or a program designed to appease Americans who wanted more profound change?

The first major test of the curriculum came in 2008, when Abby Reisman, PhD ’11 (now an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania), led a large-scale study with the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD).

Students in the test classes showed not only an increased ability to retain historical knowledge and a greater appreciation for history, but also improvements in reading comprehension and critical thinking.

This twofold finding reflects the curriculum’s ability to bridge skills that K-12 history teachers sometimes view in conflict, said Rob McEntarffer, supervisor of assessment and evaluation for Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska, a district that has participated in SHEG research over the years and integrated its resources into the curriculum.

“There’s long been a pendulum swinging back and forth between an emphasis on content knowledge versus critical thinking skills,” McEntarffer said. “Some teachers identify as content experts and emphasize historical content in their classroom, and others think that students are going to forget all the content, so they want to emphasize 21st-century thinking skills. But SHEG’s research [showed] that it’s a false dichotomy.”

After the SFUSD trial, at the district’s request, Wineburg and his team built a website to house the investigational curriculum. “We called ourselves the �� History Education Group and posted our materials online,” said Wineburg. “And to our tremendous surprise, we realized that people were downloading them from all over the country.”

Joel Breakstone (center) leads a group of social studies teachers in discussion during a professional development workshop on materials developed by the �� History Education Group, now the Digital Inquiry Group. (Photo: DosEckes Productions)

“With all of our research and all of the resources we’ve developed, it’s always been about empowering students to make sense of the past and the present.”

<p>Sam Wineburg, Professor Emeritus, �� Graduate School of Education</p>

A ‘clear picture of need’

The curriculum provided just the kind of lessons that Joel Breakstone, then a high school history teacher in rural Vermont, had long sought.

As a history major at Brown University, he’d been taught to work with first-hand accounts of historical events, and he wanted his students to do the same. “But as a high school teacher I found that really challenging,” he said. “Primary documents aren’t written at a grade level that’s appropriate for 15-year-olds, and giving William Lloyd Garrison speeches to students at 7:37 in the morning doesn’t go very well.”

He found SHEG’s materials online and, inspired to explore the methods further, he enrolled in a doctoral program at the GSE, earning his PhD in 2013 and then taking on the role of SHEG’s director.

He was soon joined on staff by fellow alum Mark Smith, PhD ’14, who as director of assessment helped expand the team’s resources with Beyond the Bubble, tools using documents from the Library of Congress’ digital archive to help teachers track students’ progress with the curriculum.

In 2016, after conducting a high-profile study of how students from middle school through college struggled to evaluate the reliability of information on the internet, the organization expanded its work into Civic Online Reasoning, a curriculum focused on ways to detect misinformation based on research observing professional fact-checkers at the nation’s most prestigious news outlets. Wineburg conducted this research with GSE graduate student Sarah McGrew, PhD ’19, now an assistant professor at the University of Maryland.

“Our research painted a very clear picture of need, and we realized we had to develop a better approach to supporting students in becoming discerning consumers of information,” said Breakstone, who served as executive director of SHEG for the past ten years and continues in that role with the Digital Inquiry Group. “Even though our name was the �� History Education Group, we were working more generally to help students understand where information comes from and how to consider the source.”

Far-reaching impact

The team consults with school districts of all sizes to help educators use its materials, including a decade-long partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second-largest district in the country. SHEG has led numerous trainings every year for LAUSD since the district adopted the Reading Like a Historian curriculum in 2014.

“These trainings are one of the most requested, and they fill up immediately,” said Kieley Jackson, history and social science administrator at LAUSD, who estimates that about 1,500 teachers and 250 administrators in the district have now been through the training. “I’ve had veteran teachers quite frankly confess to me that they were in stages of burnout, and SHEG’s professional development sessions reignited the spark.”

Even with a curriculum focused largely on American history, SHEG found fans around the globe. In Australia, Jonathon Dallimore, executive officer of the History Teachers’ Association of New South Wales, praised the organization for showing a generation of teachers that it’s possible to use primary sources with young learners — for providing a model, and showing that it works.

“The great power of the material is that it’s an introduction into some really complicated ways of thinking about the world,” he said. “These are incredibly mature concepts about time and perspective and the way people operate, which hopefully can help students develop confidence and humility at the same time.”

Beginning its new chapter as an independent nonprofit, the group plans to expand its offerings, from additional professional development opportunities (including “on demand” workshops) to new tools to help schools integrate digital literacy into core subjects across the curriculum.

Through a licensing agreement with ��, all of SHEG’s materials will remain freely available on the DIG website.

“As a small group, we’ve always sought to make as much noise as possible,” said Breakstone. “It’s been remarkable to see the reach we’ve had, with a staff of no more than four people at a time — seeing folks in California and Arkansas, Italy and Sweden, Columbia and Taiwan, all taking up these ways of doing history and digital literacy. As DIG, we hope to have an even greater impact.”

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How technology is reinventing education

Olivia Peterkin — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 19:55:04 +0000

How technology is reinventing education

Olivia Peterkin Wed, 02/14/2024 - 11:55

Image credit: Claire Scully

Curriculum and Instruction | Teaching | Technology

�� GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and other scholars weigh in on what's next for some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom.

February 14, 2024

By Carrie Spector

New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

“Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Dan Schwartz, dean of �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the �� Accelerator for Learning. “But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.”

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other �� education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students’ use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities – for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the �� Accelerator for Learning. “I’m heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers’ lives better – not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do,” he said. “I hope to see more on that front.”

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. “AI is not going away,” said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. “We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology.”

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

“This is an area that’s really going to explode over the next couple of years,” said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the �� Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. “Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live.”

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. “If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers.”

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.

“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”

Gamification sometimes tries to make “chocolate-covered broccoli,” Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students’ activities in the classroom and online. “We’re now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes,” said Schwartz – data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data – now owned by tech companies – is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students’ interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that’s being collected, said Schwartz – and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is “requiring people to check their assumptions about education,” said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. “But it’s also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It’s an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching – this is the path I hope to see.”

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Untangling the web

Carrie Spector — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:14:51 +0000

Untangling the web

Carrie Spector Mon, 11/27/2023 - 16:14

A new law requires California K-12 schools to add media literacy lessons throughout the curriculum, the latest of several state laws to help young people learn to judge the credibility of information online. (Photo: iStock)

Civics and History | Curriculum and Instruction | Teaching

As a growing number of states move to require media literacy in schools, �� Professor Sam Wineburg shares strategies from a new book.

December 1, 2023

By Carrie Spector

Starting Jan. 1, 2024, California K-12 schools will be required by law to add media literacy lessons throughout the curriculum – the latest of several state laws recently adopted, in part, to help young people learn to better judge the credibility of information online.

“For years, our research has shown that students struggle to make sense of what they encounter on the internet and social media,” said Sam Wineburg, the Margaret Jacks Professor Emeritus at �� Graduate School of Education and founder of the �� History Education Group, whose research was cited in California’s legislation. “But you can’t blame young people for not knowing how to do something they’ve never been taught.”

In a new book, Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions About What to Believe Online, Wineburg and co-author Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, detail an array of strategies for assessing the credibility of articles, websites, and videos shared on the internet and social media.

Here, Wineburg talks about some of these strategies, the power of emotions for detecting misinformation, and why critical thinking isn’t always the best approach for evaluating online content.

GSE Professor Emeritus Sam Wineburg

You say that online, “critical ignoring” is just as important as critical thinking. What do you mean by that?

I’m all in favor of critical thinking and deep reading, but assessing online content requires different skills. You’re not necessarily going to get to the bottom of an unfamiliar website and learn who might really be behind it by spending a lot of time on it, examining it in detail. You need to leave that site and search the broader web for context.

Close reading and critical thinking also require sustained, focused attention, which is a limited resource in our attention economy. Attention is the brain’s high-octane fuel, and we need to be discerning about how and when we use it. If you’re a cyclist in a big race, it’s great to pedal fast, but you also want to pace yourself, reduce resistance from the wind, maximize your strokes. You want to conserve your energy for when you really need it.

The same principle holds true when it comes to the information that comes across our screens. Expending attention on dubious sources is a colossal waste of time and energy. It can also be dangerous, exhausting your mind for important tasks and warping your perspective. Critical ignoring can keep you from squandering your attention on digital scams.

So in cases where something is worth your attention, how do you go about maximizing your effort?

First, don’t spend more than a minute on an unfamiliar website. Don’t try to evaluate it by relying on what it says about itself on its “About” page. Get off the page, and do a search on the name of whatever you’re investigating – a person, an organization, a company – to see what the rest of the web has to say. Then, resist the temptation to click the first thing that catches your eye. Take in the full set of results to get a sense of the sources.

In other words, use the web to check the web. The internet is a galaxy of electronically linked resources. If I showed you only one strand of a spider’s web, you’d have no idea what it looks like or how it works. The way you understand a single node in a network is to understand its relationship to other nodes.

“Propaganda is designed to evoke a visceral response, and that emotional reaction can bypass our rational thinking. But emotions are also important for processing information.” — Sam Wineburg

What about when the information is coming from a video shared on social media, where you might not have a source or any context to evaluate?

The first question to ask yourself is always: Do I understand what I’m looking at? The idea that “seeing is believing” doesn’t apply to videos online, especially short clips. How do you know if it’s actually depicting what it says it is? How do you know whether it’s from a different time, or even a different location? And even if the video is from what it purports to be, do you know what happened before and after the events in the short clip you’ve seen? Who posted it and supplied the description? Can you track down the original, full-length video?

There’s a lot of concern about “deepfake” videos created through AI, but anyone can easily crop existing footage, put a headline on it, change the date, and get millions of views. These are cheap fakes, and we have to worry about them. We don’t realize how easily we can be deceived, especially when our emotions are triggered.

You write in the book that emotions can also operate in our favor when it comes to assessing credibility. How is that?

It’s true, emotions can work both ways. Propaganda is designed to evoke a visceral response, and that emotional reaction can bypass our rational thinking. But emotions are also important for processing information.

Feelings tell us to pay attention. If we find something compelling or surprising, that shows us what’s important to check out and where to dig deeper. It’s a signal to stop and go back to what you first saw or read. We make better decisions when we draw on the strengths of both feelings and intellect.

How does the rise of AI chatbots, like ChatGPT, affect the landscape of misinformation?

These chatbots are built on large language models, which draw on information from the internet to generate words and phrases people tend to say. Their goal is not to be accurate. Their goal is to be convincing.

The text that you get from these models is homogenized – we have no idea where the information comes from. So we need to approach it with the same skills we’d use to evaluate a website or other online content. And because these chatbots can now easily fake the tone and style of a reputable source, it’s more important than ever to investigate broadly.

How much of an impact do you believe media literacy requirements in schools will have?

These laws are a start in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go. If digital literacy is just another thing we dump on teachers’ heads, it won’t work. It needs to be woven seamlessly into the regular curriculum, rather than a patch slapped onto an already crowded school day. And if teachers don’t feel confident teaching these skills, then no matter how good the curriculum is, it will die on some dusty shelf. The place to start is by investing in high-quality professional development for teachers so they feel capable of helping students navigate an increasingly treacherous digital terrain.

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Bringing AI literacy to high schools

Carrie Spector — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 19:13:25 +0000

Bringing AI literacy to high schools

Carrie Spector Thu, 08/10/2023 - 12:13

The purpose of CRAFT, a project based at �� Graduate School of Education, is to create and freely distribute resources about AI that high school teachers can use in their teaching. (Photo: Getty Images)

Curriculum and Instruction | Innovation | Technology

�� education researchers collaborated with teachers to develop classroom-ready AI resources for high school instructors across subject areas.

August 7, 2023

By Nikki Goth Itoi

It’s the start of English 11 class at Birmingham Charter in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, and teacher Lindsay Humphrey has planned an activity to show how computers experience sound. She will play a song and then ask the students to guess which visual waveform represents the music they heard. The point of the lesson: Music is one of many examples where computers “see” differently from humans. For many in the class, this will be a first exposure to artificial intelligence (AI) technology, and she’s excited to see how they react to it.

Humphrey is a �� Hollyhock Program alum, and her lesson plan is one example of the type of resources coming from the CRAFT (Classroom-ready Resources about AI For Teaching) project in the Graduate School of Education with support from �� HAI, �� Digital Education (SDE), the �� Accelerator for Learning, and the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. CRAFT’s purpose is to create and freely distribute resources about AI that high school teachers can use in their teaching.

“At my school, there are a couple of other teachers who are excited about AI, but the rest are worried the sky is falling,” Humphrey says. “Keeping kids from cheating is not the issue. We don’t need to fear this technology. Let’s unpack the bias, bring it into the light, teach it, and show that we can mitigate it. Thanks to the CRAFT program, I have the tools to be an AI thought leader at my campus.”

AI awareness for all

The idea to mobilize �� education and AI experts to create public curricular resources originated with Victor Lee, an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education, faculty affiliate of �� HAI, and director of the CRAFT program. Lee says two imperatives shaped his thinking about AI in an education context: We must help young people to prepare for a changing economy and workforce and to understand how AI affects their lives.

“Regardless of whether someone anticipates being in a technical career, being an informed person in society means understanding AI,” he says.

To address these two imperatives, all high schools need access to basic AI tools and training. Yet the reality is that many underserved schools in low-income areas lack the bandwidth, skills, and confidence to guide their students through an AI-powered world. And if the pattern continues, AI will only worsen existing inequities. With this concern top of mind plus initial funding from the McCoy Ethics Center, Lee began recruiting some graduate students and high school teachers to explore how to give more people equal footing in the AI space.

Today, the CRAFT program has attracted the passion and enthusiasm of a broad team of student and staff researchers, software developers, and curriculum developers, including SDE Graduate Student Fellow Parth Sarin, Embedded EthiCS Fellow Benjamin Xie, and SDE Education Technology Research & Learning Specialist Jacob Wolf.

Participatory, multidisciplinary design

From the start, the CRAFT team recruited a cohort of 10 teachers representing a variety of subjects — from English to history — and geographies — both urban and rural. Through monthly work sessions, researchers and educators began to explore what basic AI concepts could look like across multiple high school subject areas.

In each session, a member of the CRAFT team posed a question, and the participating teachers shared their insights. A key requirement for the CRAFT team was to make sure the materials would be flexible for many classroom use cases. Teachers need to be able to adapt materials to fit their individual teaching styles, educational needs, and time constraints. For example, in a discussion of the DALL-E 2 foundation model for creating images, one art teacher suggested having students draw on their own first and then consult the model, while another proposed having students look at AI-generated images to stretch their imaginations.

Sarin says the �� team has focused intensely on creating moments for teacher expression and opportunities for collaborative revision.

“It’s been inspiring to work with the CRAFT team,” says Jesse Bustos, a social studies teacher at Sequoia High School in Redwood City, Calif. “They give us the keys to the castle, time, and resources to explore what’s out there. I’ve had fun dreaming up how we can reimagine education.” Bustos adds that he hopes the free curricular resources from the CRAFT project will spur more conversations about interdisciplinary approaches to learning about technology and how it can be used in education.

“Most schools are siloed in how they approach their subjects,” he explains. “The CRAFT project brought a diverse array of teachers together, and we all can see a bit of ourselves and the subjects we teach in the resources. We’re not running from the topic of AI, but instead embracing it.”

The team will continue to develop the CRAFT collection of short activities to help art, math, history, and English teachers introduce a bit of AI into their courses, whenever they see an opportunity. Lee understands that relatively few schools will be able to incorporate a dedicated AI literacy course into their curricula, since they have little room to spare in their schedules and no resources to teach the material. By contrast, a library of classroom-ready and adaptable resources that fit into smaller pockets of discretionary time during the school year presents an attractive way of reaching more students over the long term.

Bustos agrees with this approach: “I plan to use the AI case studies in the economics, government, and world history courses I teach next year. CRAFT spells out the objectives for each lesson, making it easier to integrate into my curriculum,” he says.

Changing how we teach

As the CRAFT website launches, the team is thinking about the big picture. Lee envisions a tighter coupling of what’s happening on the bleeding edge of AI technology with what can be learned in schools, while others are thinking about a continual regeneration of content over time. Although the project is U.S.-based for now, there already is international interest, and a global focus is a possible direction for the future.

Perhaps most exciting, the team sees the emphasis on multidisciplinary AI modules as a step toward foundational change in the education model. “In the same way that search engines changed our relationship to public information, AI changes not only how students learn but also what is important to learn,” Xie adds.

From her vantage point as a teacher, Humphrey echoes this sentiment. “Right now, we have a factory model of education. It’s about paint by number, fill in the blanks. It doesn’t support critical thinking and it’s not allowing students to work in their areas of personal interest. In the next five to ten years, we won’t need to teach in the same ways we’ve been teaching. It’s going to be about helping students understand how to wield powerful AI tools.”

To get involved, visit the CRAFT website or contact Victor Lee.

This story was originally published by HAI.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Victor R. Lee

What do history textbooks teach teens about climate change?

Carrie Spector — Sat, 27 May 2023 19:55:27 +0000

What do history textbooks teach teens about climate change?

Carrie Spector Sat, 05/27/2023 - 12:55

New research suggests that widely used history textbooks in California and Texas, which strongly influence textbook content nationwide, tend to emphasize controversy in discussions of climate science and prompt students to think about our planet’s rapid warming as a matter of opinion. (Photo: Getty Images)

Civics and History | Curriculum and Instruction | Teaching

A new study finds that popular U.S. history textbooks in California and Texas commonly misrepresent the scientific consensus around climate change.

May 25, 2023

By Josie Garthwaite

California and Texas textbooks have their differences when it comes to teaching teenagers about American history and the way that subjects like race, gender, and immigration weave through it. But a new �� University study has found the two states’ U.S. history textbooks are surprisingly similar when dealing with climate change and environmental topics.

Published May 23 in Environmental Education Research, the study analyzed each word and sentence in 30 of the most popular U.S. history textbooks in California and Texas. The results suggest widely used history textbooks in the two states, which strongly influence textbook content nationwide, tend to emphasize controversy in discussions of climate science and prompt students to think about our planet’s rapid warming as a matter of opinion or a two-sided issue.

Teaching complexity

“When teaching history, it’s an important skill for students to be able to consider alternative viewpoints,” said senior study author Patricia Bromley, an associate professor at the �� Doerr School of Sustainability and �� Graduate School of Education. “But the way that this skill is being applied to climate change falsely suggests that the science is undecided.”

Scientific evidence unequivocally shows human activities, mainly through emissions of greenhouse gases, have caused global warming. The planet’s surface temperatures are now 1.1 Celsius (2 Fahrenheit) hotter on average compared to when burning fossil fuels for energy took off in the 1800s.

Bromley and lead study author Hannah D’Apice, a PhD student in international comparative education, say a better approach – found in a few of the popular textbooks they analyzed – is to invite students to consider the complex social dimensions of climate impacts and political processes for creating policies, without misrepresenting the scientific consensus around climate change.

“It matters how students are taught to see climate change as a civic issue and integrate scientific information into their understanding of what it means to be an engaged community member and citizen,” said D’Apice. “Scientific literacy is really important for social issues, public health, and long-term public well-being.”

Collective action

Both states’ textbooks shared a tendency to mention corporations’ contributions to climate change and environmental damage only in passing, gloss over potential environmental risks of major dams and other public works, and present what the authors describe as an overly limited view of who holds the power to create change.

“Perhaps unsurprisingly, the textbooks primarily discuss government and prominent individual figures as the primary agents that can take action in relation to climate change,” said Bromley, who also leads the Global Civil Society & Sustainable Development Lab in ��’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. As future voters, the authors write, students have collective power to elect leaders that seek to address climate change and pressure big polluters to change.

“History and civics curricula are some of the most important tools we have for teaching students to be thoughtful and engaged citizens,” D’Apice said. “If we want collective action around climate change, students need to understand not only the scientific consensus, but also the political and social mechanisms they themselves can use to create change.”

AI trained on a new climate dictionary

To analyze the content, D’Apice and Bromley used a type of artificial intelligence known as natural language processing, which enables computers to perform tasks like measuring sentiment and the relative prevalence of different parts of text.

To select relevant text, the researchers first generated a broad list of terms and sentences related to climate change, drawing on glossaries and documents such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Then they reviewed any words that appeared more than 150 times in the textbook data for additional possible terms. To clean the text, they culled terms such as “nature” and “Industrial Revolution” that can be related to climate or environment, but which also appeared very frequently in sentences unrelated to those topics.

They ultimately came up with a list of 141 terms, ranging from “greenhouse gas” and “pollution” to “asthma,” “footprint,” and “levee failure.” After an initial scan to remove irrelevant sentences (when “exhaust” referred to tiring out, for example, rather than the stuff from a tailpipe), the authors had a final sample of nearly 6,400 sentences. “In the big picture, when we can computationally look at the whole corpus, there are very few differences between the two states in how climate change is depicted,” Bromley said.

The broad “climate dictionary” and the method for refining and analyzing it is now a resource that can be adapted and scaled to measure environmental education worldwide, said Bromley, who is collaborating with groups including the United Nations-backed Mission 4.7 to develop global indicators around education for sustainable development. “We need more people to start thinking about climate change as something that should be integrated throughout all other aspects of society,” she said. “It’s not just an issue for science.”

This work was supported by �� Institute for Human-Centered AI, ��’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS), and the Center on Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI).

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