Is this a picture of something bad, or something good?
Cognitive scientists call this the global-local processing dilemma: Do we perceive the overall image, or focus on the details? Education policy often faces the same question: Can a policy be considered “good” if the overall data look promising, but the day-to-day experiences feel “bad?”
This tension is at the heart of California’s college math reforms.
Like the image, the story of these policies may look “good” from a distance, but “bad” up close.
Before recent reforms, community college students who needed extra math support were typically placed in remedial courses like elementary algebra. These classes didn’t count toward transfer requirements, and most students stuck in them never made it to a math course needed to transfer to a four-year university, such as college algebra or introductory statistics. This created an academic dead end for many.
A 2017 law, Assembly Bill 705, changed that. It used high school grades for placement and gave more students direct access to transfer-level courses, with corequisite support (a support course taken concurrently with a transfer-level course) when needed. Instead of multi-semester remediation, students could move into transfer-level math courses faster.
While challenges remain, the approach led to significant improvements. In 2016-17, before AB 705 was announced, only 27% of students passed a transfer-level math course within one year. But in 2019-20, the first full year of AB 705’s implementation, that number had nearly doubled to 51%. And by 2023-24, it reached 62%. About 30,000 more students were fulfilling their math requirements each year. The story is similar in English courses, and so it’s undeniable that AB 705 has helped California’s community college students get one step closer to transfer.
Despite these gains, many faculty don’t see AB 705 as a success. As one instructor put it, “There are a lot more people failing than before … largely students of color. … By making this change (i.e., AB 705) around equity, we’ve created an inequitable system.” And the data do show that pass rates have declined.
But here’s the catch: Far more students are now taking those courses. The graph below helps illustrate this shift using data from one community college district. Before AB 705, only a small fraction of students reached transfer-level math, but with high pass rates, as shown by the darker blue shading within the dashed box. After AB 705, access expanded, but pass rates declined from 80% to 70%. Critically, that’s 70% of a much larger group.
With such an improvement, why do some faculty feel like the policy is a failure?
Because of this paradox: AB 705 absolutely led to more students passing. But it also led to more students failing.
People respond more strongly to stories than to statistics, and losses loom larger than gains. The students we see struggling — their faces, their frustration, their stories — linger longer than a bar graph showing statewide gains. As faculty members, we know this all too well. We remember the students who didn’t make it. We think about what we could’ve done differently. We agonize over them.
And often, faculty haven’t been given the full picture. Our research has found that many instructors hadn’t even seen outcome data on AB 705’s impact. So, without that context, and given the classroom experience, it’s reasonable to assume the policy failed.
This disconnect is a classic challenge in public policy: a policy can be effective overall but still feel painful on the ground. And this tension is always a part of the hard work of building systemic justice. AB 705 succeeded in dismantling long-standing barriers and expanding access to transfer-level math. But that progress has introduced new classroom dynamics that feel personal, urgent and overwhelming to faculty. Good policy must account for both the big-picture gains and the human cost of change. Reforms don’t succeed on data alone. They require understanding, empathy and support for those doing the work.
And just as faculty were beginning to adjust to AB 705, we face Assembly Bill 1705, a sharper and even more controversial new policy. It asks colleges to stretch even more, limiting their ability to offer even prerequisite math courses. Understandably, many educators are still reeling. They’re trying to adapt to new expectations while managing unintended consequences in their classrooms. Recent guidance has softened the rollout, but confusion remains. The stakes are high, and many faculty feel mistrustful and angry.
If AB 705 taught us anything, it’s that mistrust grows when there’s a gap between what the data show and what people experience. This is why the next phase of work cannot be just about compliance or policy enforcement. It must be about storytelling, listening and solutions. Faculty need to see the big picture. Policymakers need to understand life on the ground. The policy “worked” in aggregate, but not without professional and emotional cost. If we ignore that, we risk undermining the very equity goals these reforms were meant to achieve.
Like the image above, the truth lies in seeing both levels clearly. We must acknowledge the trade-offs, the tension, and the very real pain of transition. Let’s take concerns seriously without retreating from hard-won progress. Let’s keep asking the harder, more honest questions: How do we support both students and faculty through ambitious change? How do we ensure that every student, not just the most prepared, has a real shot at success?
If we can do that, maybe we’ll find a way forward that is both honest and hopeful, one that sees the whole picture.
•••
Ji Y. Son, Ph.D., is a cognitive scientist and professor at California State University, Los Angeles and co-founder of CourseKata.org, a statistics and data science curriculum used by colleges and high schools. Federick Ngo, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research examines higher education policy, with a focus on college access and community college students.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the authors. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
I wasn’t expecting a math journal entry to shift my perspective. But as I scanned through my students’ reflections that morning, one response stopped me in my tracks:
“It’s more important to me that my teacher sees me as a person than if I get all the answers right.”
A student, who I’ll call Jason, had been in my class for months — quiet, polite, barely noticeable. Not failing, not thriving. Just…there.
Jason’s words reflected what many students feel but rarely say. As I reviewed other journal entries, I discovered an echo of voices expressing uncertainty, quiet resilience and a desire to be heard. I highlighted themes and let their words settle in, but as responses piled up, I needed help seeing the bigger picture.
That’s when I turned to artificial intelligence (AI), using it to help summarize journal entries — not replacing my judgment but sharpening it. ChatGPT surfaced patterns I might have missed: anxiety about speaking up, appreciation for kindness, the importance of being seen. AI didn’t give me a summary of responses — it gave me perspective, revealing what my students were telling me between the lines.
Too many students walk into math class carrying untold stories — about race, failure, shame, invisibility. And math, with its perceived rigid right-or-wrong structure, often leaves little room for the messiness of being human. Reflective journals and AI made that space. They reminded us that learning is emotional before it’s cognitive.
For educators exploring how to move from algorithms to empathy, here’s what I’ve learned:
Use AI as a reflection partner to surface trends in student voice. I introduced reflective journals with prompts like “How do you see yourself in math?” and “Where might math be important in your life?” When responses accumulated, AI helped me identify emotional throughlines—what students feared, valued, and needed to feel seen. It didn’t analyze feelings for me; it spotlighted patterns across dozens of responses, allowing me to respond not just as a content expert, but as a listener who could address the class’s collective needs.
Let AI handle the grunt work so you can do the heart work. After AI helped me identify themes like “I don’t feel smart, but I try harder than people know” and “I’m not the only one scared to ask for help,” I shared these anonymous insights with my class. Heads nodded. The room shifted. These reflections weren’t about fixing students — they were about making space where vulnerability felt safe and mathematical identity could evolve.
Design with AI — not for it. I didn’t start by asking what AI could do, but rather “What do my students need to feel seen, challenged and supported?” Only then did I explore how technology could help me meet those needs more thoughtfully and efficiently. The tools followed the vision, not the other way around.
Treat AI like a co-teacher, not a substitute. AI will never replace the personal connections at the heart of teaching, but it can help me see what I might miss in the everyday chaos of the classroom. This partnership allows me to combine technological insights with the relational knowledge that only comes from knowing my students.
The day after reading Jason’s journal entry, I greeted him more intentionally and shared that I had once felt the same way about being seen as a person first. It was a tiny signal: I see you. This breakthrough emerged from recognizing that community building in math class doesn’t require elaborate group projects or icebreakers. Sometimes it starts with something quieter: giving students space to examine their relationship with mathematics itself, then using AI to help us listen more deeply to what they’re telling us.
A week later, Jason lingered after class. “Thanks,” he said. “For, like, sharing with me.”
That two-second moment cracked something open — for both of us. Because behind every silence is a student waiting to be seen. And sometimes, the most powerful data we can use isn’t a test score or a benchmark — it’s a journal entry, a nod of recognition, or a quiet “thank you” made visible with the help of AI, reminding us why we teach.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
A first-grade boy and his kindergarten friend read together on a bench outside. Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education
Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education
Attention must be paid. Amid the worsening literacy and numeracy crises in our schools, Doug Lemov, former teacher, education expert and author of the bestseller “Teach Like a Champion,” believes that there should be far greater awareness of what the research says about how the brain works, that parents and teachers should know how kids learn best.
Funny, warm and unassuming, Lemov recently took a few minutes away from his latest book to hold forth on how we can better connect what we know about cognition with what we do in the classroom. These insights into the science of learning shape the way he thinks about everything from focus to engagement, from the use of cellphones at school to why kids should read entire books, and not just passages, to fuel reading comprehension.
Is it possible that diminished student focus is part of why test scores have cratered? Could it be one cause of the literacy and numeracy crises?
Yes. On two levels. Attention is always the currency of learning. To learn something you first have to pay attention to it and sustain that attention. When attention is fractured, both learning and performance are lowered. And, of course, a habit of paying lesser attention reduces long-term learning. So, students both learn less and can produce poorer versions of what they do know when their focus is diminished.
Why might cellphones and other devices in the classroom diminish focus?
They are designed by the sharpest minds in society to do just that. They are designed to disrupt and reroute attention to the things on your phone. That is the business model: to get eyeballs. To do that you have to create a malleable consumer.
And humans are inclined to respond to new and unexpected stimuli. We evolved to do this because the new and unexpected is often — or was often — important in terms of survival. Hear a new noise in the woods you’ve never heard before? If you want your progeny to pass down into modernity, you’d better pay particular attention.
We are also especially responsive to “variable, unpredictable rewards” —we want affirmation —we are wired to be social because we are weak as individuals and could never compete with other species and only survived evolution because we banded together.
Group formation is an evolutionary imperative. We are hypersensitive to whether we are still liked and loved by the group because if not, we know we are at risk. Unpredictable and variable rewards hack that system. We’re always wondering if we’ve gotten those “likes” … and when we do, we get a little dopamine hit in our brains. And, in the end, the brain is neuroplastic. It wires how it fires. If you are constantly distracted, constantly seeking affirmation, you come to need the distraction and the affirmation, to be wired to expect it.
First you need your cellphone close to you all the time, but after a while your cellphone is within you. Its influence is wired into you even when it’s not there.
And would removing cellphones also help build student engagement?
It would help students to pay far better attention and to rebuild attentional skills. And it would reduce the anxiety of the shadow world of social media. My daughter’s school banned cellphones this year. She was not happy because she loves to listen to music. And she suspected I might have had something to do with it. So she was upset the first week. But on Friday she came to me and said: “Dad, don’t let this go to your head, but I can’t believe how much happier and less stressed I am without my phone. It’s just like this thing that was always on my mind is gone.”
What is important to understand about cognition, how working memory functions, for example, when teaching kids how to read or do math?
Working memory is the brain’s ability to think actively and consciously about something. It’s definitely a superpower, and its effectiveness is directly tied to attentional skills and focus. But learning is, a cognitive scientist would say, a change in long-term memory. In fact, we don’t learn most of the things we think about. We forget instead. And again, attention is one of the key drivers of the process of encoding — which is getting what we think about into our long-term memory.
Why does background knowledge matter?
Reading comprehension is not a set of formalistic skills. Practicing making inferences about “Tuck Everlasting” won’t help me make inferences about “Little House on the Prairie” because resolving the ambiguity in any text demands background knowledge. You make the inference that something special is happening in town when you are reading “Little House” because the girls are taking baths on a Wednesday evening. And if you know that people on the prairie in the 19th century only bathed for church on Sunday and on special occasions — because taking a bath required you to bring water up from the well and chop wood to heat it pan by pan, and so it was incredibly labor intensive — if you know that, you make the inference, and if you don’t, you don’t. So once students are fluent readers, background knowledge is the single biggest influence on comprehension.
Why is it important for kids to read whole books, instead of just reading passages, to foster reading comprehension?
Life is complex. A book is a long-form reflection on a topic. A narrator almost never sees the world at the end the way he or she does at the beginning. Understanding the world takes 200 pages, and that is actually a better reflection of the humility and depth it takes to navigate the world than the belief that we can tell the story of our lives fully in radically truncated forms.
You can only read fully if you understand “voice” … who is this person speaking to me, and how do they communicate? What are the gaps between what they say and what they are? A long-form relationship with a sustained narrative voice is necessary for the deepest forms of comprehension.
Why do we read less deeply online? If there is less brain activation from reading on screen, as some research suggests, why don’t we encourage kids to read printed books?
I’m not sure why we don’t, but maybe we need a short pithy phrase to remind ourselves that learning and reading are better without screens. So my phrase is: high text; low tech.
I’m really excited to share our newest video clip–a great example of of one of the most important techniques in the TLAC library, FASE Reading. FASE Reading is a technique that supports student fluency and engagement in reading, topics we discuss extensively in the forthcoming TLAC Guide to the Science of Reading.
The clip comes to us from Jessica Sliman’s 4th grade classroom in Whitefish, MT. It shows 3 and a half minutes of Jessica and her students reading aloud from Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars.
I suspect you will love it as much as everyone on Team TLAC did.
First, here’s the clip:
Now some things we loved:
We love her initial framing, “I want you guys to notice moments of suspense.” This shapes student attention. Learning always starts with attention and directing students to attend to a ‘most important’ thing is one of the most important things a teacher can do. Jessica does a simple and elegant job of it here
Then they’re off reading. Jessica goes first. Her reading is beautifully expressive. She’s bringing the story to life modeling how to read meaningfully so that students will copy her. This will them to build the habit of infusing their reading with expression. Research suggests that this assists with meaning and is likely to translate into better and more expressive silent reading for students.
Izzy is the first student to read. she does a really nice job but Jessica pushes her to bring a bit more expression to her reading in a lighthearted and positive way: “How would she say that?” She’s making a norm of expressive reading that models her own. And happily this just increases her students’ enjoyment. Their laughter at Izzy’s portrayal underscores this.
Hadrian goes next. THere’s a great moment where Jessica drops in a quick definition of the word “prolong”–she’s recognized that students may not know the word and that it’s important. She provides the key knowledge without distracting from the story.
Hadrian is a pretty good reader but he’s also still developing his expressiveness. So it’s lovely the way she praises him for his “extra expression on “very very frightened.” Again the key is to cause students to practice reading aloud with expression and in so doing improve their fluency and infuse maximum meaning into their reading. She builds that culture intentionally.
Next Jessica reads again- moving the story along a bit, keeping it alive and fresh with her own expressive reading–she is after all, the best reader in the class–and modeling again for students how to express meaning as you read. Notice that she’s reading slightly more slowly than her natural rate might be. She’s reminding her class that fast reading isn’t good reading. Expressive reading is.
Steven reads next. Notice by the way that she calls on students unpredictably to read and that every student she’s called on is ready to read right away. This tells her something critical. Her leverage is high–meaning that she knows now that her students are not just listening but reading along.
Steven does something really interesting. He self-corrects, re-reading a sentence of his own volition not because he read it wrong but because he didn’t express its meaning as well as he could have. It’s a very meta-cognitive moment. “Oh, i didn’t capture that quite right.” Interestingly, Jessica doesn’t have to ask him whether he understands this passage. the way that he reads it SHOWS her this. So they can simply keep reading.
But what a statement about the culture of error Jessica has created! Students willingly and unselfconsciously improve their reading as they go.
Weston is next. We love the rhythm of the reading she’s established. Burst of reading are just long enough to allow students to take real pleasure in expressing the text but short enough to allow them to read with maximum success and attention. The switching feels lively but not disruptive. It balances the need to keep students on their toes–I might be next!--and locked in to the story. Beautiful.
Gracefully, Jessica steps in on the word cautiously and reads through to the end herself, again with beautiful expression.
It’s pretty clear that this reading–and that of her students–has had a real effect of her class since they plead to keep reading at the end. “We have to read the next chapter!” one student says urgently. They don’t want to stop!
Trees are teaching tools at the Berkeley Forest School. Credit: Courtesy of the Berkeley Forest School
At a forest school, the roof is the bright blue sky, a cluster of ladybugs flying through the air can turn into a science lesson and the fog lingering on your face becomes an example of the water cycle.
Learning amid the leaves is the core of the curriculum in outdoor early learning programs, which often focus on children aged 3 to 5. Mother Nature provides the classroom where the littlest learners can dig up snake skins, bury treasure maps and climb trees, steeping in the myriad wonders of life.
Yet, that’s the exception to the rule these days, as many preschool children spend too much time indoors huddled around screens. Despite the fact that time in nature increases opportunities for play and exercise, boosting children’s health and development and reducing hyperactivity — the bane of our short-attention span era — most American preschoolers don’t get enough time outdoors, according to a new national report from the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER).
“Outdoor nature-based learning is vital for young children’s health, development, and education,” according to the report, which was written by W. Steven Barnett, the institute’s senior co-director and founder, and Kate Hodges, an early childhood education policy specialist. “Increased screen time and reduced exposure to nature are linked to serious health problems, such as obesity, diabetes, hyperactivity, stress, asthma, and allergies.”
Sharpening a sense of stillness, calm and focus is easier for children in a natural setting, experts say. Amid the post-pandemic rise in child behavioral issues, some suggest that outdoor education might be an antidote to shattered attention spans and frayed nerves.
“The kids are play-deprived,” said Angela Hanscom, a pediatric occupational therapist and founder of Timbernook, a research-backed therapeutic play program. “Once they dive deep into the play, they calm down. It’s very interesting to watch. Being outside also helps you get you into an alert state of mind, which is ideal for the brain.”
Giving children enough time for free play, experts say, may make it easier for them to sit quietly at their desk later. As with many aspects of the educational system, the risks of getting stuck too long indoors are elevated for low-income students, according to the institute’s report.
“These issues are particularly concerning for low-income children who often have limited access to safe outdoor spaces. By prioritizing nature-based learning in early childhood programs, states can help mitigate these health risks.”
Hanscom notes that in an attempt to keep kids safe, we may have unwittingly put them in a new kind of danger. Some of the children she works with now require the kind of physical therapy, particularly balance and flow exercises, that were previously reserved for the geriatric. We force children to sit still at an age when they are built to move, she says, which has hampered their development.
“Their neurological system is not developing properly,” Hanscom said. “We’re overly restricting children’s ability to move and play in pretty profound ways, and we’re actually causing harm to their development now. They’re literally falling out of the chairs and they’re having trouble paying attention, and they’re becoming more and more clumsy in their environment.”
The lack of nature exposure in many kindergarten programs is ironic given that the term originated with visionary 19th century educator Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten movement, “who believed that children are like flowers and need care and cultivation to grow and blossom, hence the name,” notes Barnett. Froebel’s original program featured an actual garden in which children each tended to their own plots.
“Learning through nature was an important part of the program,” said Barnett. “Froebel also emphasized the preparation of highly proficient teachers, so it was not just the outdoor/nature aspect that has been lost.”
Rethinking the preschool experience to include the myriad wonders of the natural world is part of the purpose of the report. There is much to be learned from stomping through puddles, scrambling over fallen logs and digging in the dirt with sticks, some say.
Students explore at the Berkeley Forest School. Credit: Courtesy of the Berkeley Forest School
“Considering that many preschool children attend for at least four to six hours per day, leaders should consider whether 30-60 minutes of outdoor time is sufficient,” said Barnett. “Many lessons can also be learned from forest or outdoor preschools in which children interact with a natural landscape and spend the entire preschool day outside.”
Rooted in the Scandinavian education tradition, forest schools got a huge boost in popularity during the pandemic as a safe way to keep learning going even when buildings were closed. There are roughly 800 nature preschools in the U.S., a 200% increase since 2017, according to a survey by the Natural Start Alliance.
Science has long suggested that children’s mental and academic health can be buttressed by increasing exposure to nature while decreasing time online. One report, which distilled the results of 186 studies, noted that most researchers find that time spent in nature contributes to both psychological stability and academic agility. Time spent gazing at glowing screens, meanwhile, has often been associated with poor outcomes, including increased mental illness and diminished cognition. That should not come as a surprise, experts suggest.
“Natural spaces are the context the human body has evolved in,” said Lia Grippo, founder of Wild Roots Forest School in Santa Barbara. “Our bodies expect variations in light, air temperature and movement, sights and sounds far and near, uneven terrain, space for a plethora of movements, and a host of life around us, doing what life does. When these expectations are met, we tend to be alert and relaxed. This is the state we learn best in.”
More outdoor time has also been associated with better executive functioning. One study of 562 Norwegian preschoolers found a link between time spent outdoors and sharpened executive functioning, which includes attention and short-term memory. That study also found a connection between too much time indoors and hyperactivity symptoms.
“Outdoor and nature-based preschool activities contribute to children’s health development directly, support more complex play,” said Barnett, “and offer a teaching tool for children to learn about nature and the environment.”
When Grippo taught at a traditional preschool, she tried hard to get the children outside into green spaces for playtime. She noticed that a lot of behavioral issues disappeared when the little ones were playing in meadows or woodlands. The children were quickly soothed by the pleasures of the natural playground, she said.
“Over time, this pattern became painfully clear,” said Grippo, who learned to forage in the woods as a child in Latvia. “Many of the problems I was working with were in fact problems of the environment rather than the children. Over the next few years, I spent more and more time in natural settings with the children until I finally abandoned the indoor space all together. It was the children who showed me what they needed.”
Anything children encounter in nature can become a springboard to learning, some say. A dead bug can spark a discussion about the circle of life. A muddy stream becomes an art studio for a clay-based art project. A stack of sticks can be the raw material to build a fort in the forest.
“Young children need a tremendous amount of movement in order to develop the capacity for stillness,” said Grippo, president of the California Association of Forest Schools. “They need an environment that offers a rich diversity of experiences with a healthy blend of predictability and novelty, in order to incorporate new information and understanding. They need to feel a part of a large family, larger than just the human family. Nature provides for all of these needs.”
The classroom is outside at many forest schools.credit: Berkeley Forest School
Boosting opportunities for exploration and free play is just one reason that the National Institute for Early Education Research report argues that little children need more outdoor time. Play, some experts suggest, may well be characterized as the superpower of the young. A growing body of research suggests that play may even be a way to help close the achievement gap.
“Just one of the many important reasons for increasing preschoolers’ time in natural spaces is that it improves the amount and quality of young children’s play,” said Barnett. “Research suggests that additional guidance and funding to support outdoor, nature-based learning in preschool settings could lead to positive early childhood educational experiences and cognitive, physical and social-emotional benefits for young learners.”
For the record, California fares better than many states because it requires some outdoor time in its subsidized preschool program, the report suggests, but it fares less well in terms of supporting nature-based schools in general.
“California is among the states with stronger policies because it requires outdoor time every day for a substantial portion of the day, sets standards for air quality for children’s outdoor time, and requires preschool programs to have outdoor space,” said Barnett. “However, it is not one of the leaders with policies specific to outdoor and nature-based programs, which do not always fit well into the usual regulations for preschool and child care programs.”
While California has more outdoor schools than most states, it should be noted that most forest schools aren’t licensed in the Golden State because they often do not have a permanent indoor venue. Washington became the first state to license outdoor preschools in 2019. There are roughly 80 such schools in California, according to the California Association of Forest Schools.
Given its storied roots and the exhaustive research proving its efficacy, why has outdoor education struggled to take root in the American educational system? Why do many assume that schooling should be dominated by fluorescent lighting, asphalt and edtech?
Students at the Berkeley Forest School have story time by the bay.Credit: Courtesy of the Berkeley Forest School
“Inadequate funding explains a lot,” said Barnett. “We don’t invest in preschool teachers and, as a result, many do not have the knowledge and skills needed. Legal worries probably make it seem risky. Public programs tend to be built as cheaply as possible with no consideration for beauty or nature. Even for older children, it is hard to tell the difference between schools and prisons when they are being built.”
While some teachers can’t wait for the latest ed-tech breakthrough to engage their students, others point to the majesty of the natural world and its ability to spark our curiosity.
“Nothing I can do as an educator can begin to approximate the depth and breadth of what the natural world has to offer,” said Grippo. “Nature teaches us to pay attention, expand awareness, move with aliveness and agility, respond to our environment, experience awe, gratitude and love, develop fortitude, make mistakes and try again, and all in a space that makes the body healthier, happier, and smarter.”
Alice Keeney was in the Navy from 2003 through 2012, where she learned how to safely operate the nuclear propulsion plants that power submarines and aircraft carriers.
When she enlisted in the Navy in 2003, Alice Keeney attended naval nuclear power school.
There, she learned how to safely operate the nuclear propulsion plants that powered submarines or aircraft carriers — knowledge that she used when she was deployed outside the Arabian Gulf as a nuclear surface warfare officer in the late 2000s.
Keeney’s expertise in nuclear theory and practice was valued enough that she became an instructor in the Navy, and she trained the first 22 women who became submarine volunteers.
Keeney specifically chose this path into the Navy because she believed it would give her skills that are valued in the civilian world. She spent many 12-hour days in school — not counting homework — studying advanced physics, math, chemistry and reactor core nuclear principles. She expected she could skip a few semesters ahead in college — and maybe even have enough funding from her G.I. Bill left over to attend graduate school. But it wasn’t that easy.
When she enrolled in chemical engineering at Cal Poly Pomona in 2012, Keeney was dismayed to learn that nothing on her Joint Services transcripts, a document that describes military training in a way that makes sense to colleges or employers, amounted to a single college credit.
“It was frustrating to look at my transcript — for somebody who has the experience I have, who has the training that I have,” Keeney said. “There were classes listed like general chemistry — I should never have had to take that.”
The benefits of getting credit for prior learning
When students start college later in life, they often bring unique knowledge and skills with them. The military is the most common way — at least it is now — but that experience can also come through a job, a hobby or even volunteering.
Increasingly, universities and colleges are working on ways to award credit to students for what they have learned outside the classroom. California’s community colleges and Cal State University system, in particular, have expanded this over the past decade, formally recognizing this experience, known as credit for prior learning (CPL).
This week, Gov. Gavin Newsom praised the practice during a news conference about the state’s effort to improve career education. He is promoting a shift toward what he calls a “skillset mindset,” where Californians can demonstrate their skills and knowledge beyond grades or a credential, whether those skills were picked up in school, the military or volunteering.
He lauded the community colleges for ensuring that military members don’t have to “take basic requirements for education that they’ve already received in the military,” he said. “They get credit for prior learning.”
How students receive credit can vary widely, depending on the discipline. Students might take a challenge test. A portfolio review by a faculty member might be appropriate for business or art courses. Some jobs require certifications that can transfer into course credit.
Research shows that students who receive credit for what they’ve learned outside a classroom save time and valuable tuition dollars. A national study by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL) found that students who entered college with 12 credits through prior learning could save anywhere from $1,500 to $10,500 and shave nine to 14 months off their time in college.
There are also psychological benefits for students who start college with credits under their belts.
“Students begin their college careers with a sense of momentum and accomplishment,” said Tina Barlolong, a veteran and credit-for-prior-learning counselor at Palomar College in San Diego.
This might help to explain why 49% of students who received this credit for prior learning completed their degree compared with 27% of students who received no credit, according to the study by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. The national study followed more than 200,000 students, largely over the age of 25, at 72 institutions for over seven years, beginning in 2011.
“That student immediately feels valued, they feel seen, and they’re going to take more advanced level classes, they’re more likely to take more units,” said Su Jin Jez, CEO of the nonprofit California Competes, a nonpartisan policy and research organization.
Students who receive credit for prior learning avoid the sense of deflation that Keeney felt when she realized that she would be required to take courses, like general chemistry, that she had long surpassed as a nuclear propulsion plant supervisor in the Navy. That may send students the message that college isn’t for them, Jez said.
“We spend all this money on them and put them in harm’s way,” said James Cahill, an advocate for credit for prior learning for vets. “They come home and are told [their experience is] worthless.”
Meeting workforce demand
This is a subject that hits close to home for Jez. Her father spent two decades as a plane mechanic in the Air Force, but when he tried to attend a community college, he struggled to prove that he had the knowledge and skills to skip ahead in his coursework. Because he couldn’t get college credit, he opted to become a letter carrier.
“We did fine, but he would have earned more,” Jez said. It’s not just her father who lost out, she said; the workforce also lost a worker with highly specialized and in-demand skills.
This is what has motivated Cahill to advocate at both the state and federal level for veterans to be awarded college credit for their military training. Cahill’s son served as a medic in Iraq, but he received no credit for his military training when he enrolled as a premed student at Sacramento State. Cahill said his son burned through his G.I. Bill money by taking a lot of classes on topics he had already put into practice on the battlefield.
Cahill testified about this issue at the height of the pandemic when the shortage of nurses became a crisis.
“If they had had these laws in place, imagine how many nurses could have backfilled,” he said. “Imagine how many teachers and law enforcement and the language that [veterans] bring to a college campus.”
Credit for prior learning isn’t a new concept. Since at least World War II, the American Council on Education has evaluated military training to help veterans transition to civilian life. But there are still no federal guidelines requiring colleges and universities to honor veterans with credit.
Recently, credit for prior learning has begun to receive renewed attention as a way to encourage students to enroll — or re-enroll — in college to finish their bachelor’s or other post-secondary degree. One group of students with some college credit but no degree has caught the attention of colleges and universities, especially in the wake of pandemic-era enrollment losses.
About 1 in 5 adults in California over age 25 have attended college but do not have a degree. These are students that were at one point interested in a credential, but were, for a variety of reasons, sidelined.
One of those students was Benjamin King. His first attempt at college didn’t go well, he said; early fatherhood threw a wrench into his plans. He planned on returning to school but then found a well-paying computer programming job that was stable — until the company downsized, and he became jobless.
“At that point, I was at this crossroads where I was trying to figure out: Do I want to continue on my programming journey or do I want to go in a different direction?” he said.
King enrolled in Palomar College to explore his options. It wasn’t his programming background that called to him, but his passion for photography. He took a job on campus running the photography lab. He enjoyed mentoring students and offering advice from the vantage of being an older student.
“The faculty really saw the way I was interacting with the younger students and how I was able to help them out,” he said.
He was encouraged to apply for an adjunct faculty position in the photography department. There was one problem: He didn’t yet have an associate degree needed for the position, and the clock was ticking for when applications would close.
Faculty encouraged him to petition for college credit through the prior learning program. Palomar College’s work to expand its process has paid huge dividends for veterans and even active duty members, but it also helped King, who had no military experience.
King put together a portfolio of his photography that the faculty reviewed. This enabled him to get credit for several photography courses, finish his degree quickly and ultimately, land the adjunct faculty position.
Now he enjoys teaching photography courses and continuing to mentor students. Recently, a pregnant student came to him concerned about her future. He was able to assure her that he had been in a similar boat — and that it wasn’t the end of the road for him.
“I enjoyed programming and still do it for fun,” King said. “But I get much more fulfillment from this job.”
California slowly improves
Trying to get credit for prior learning can be difficult. It’s not just students who need help navigating this arena — even many counselors or faculty don’t know what’s happening on their own campuses, according to Wilson Finch, vice president of initiatives at the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning.
Finch compares the national landscape of credit for prior learning to an overgrown garden: “It needs a good pruning and cleanup just to make it useful for people.”
Public universities and colleges in California have been doing some of that pruning. Legislation over the past decade has encouraged public universities to do more.
Veterans have been a key target of legislation. They make up a small percentage of the student population, but — at least for now — the majority of students who are receiving credit for prior learning. Most begin their academic careers at community colleges.
In 2012, legislators passed a bill requiring the chancellor of California Community Colleges to determine which courses could be completed using military credit. But state Sen. Richard Roth, D-Riverside, complained that three years after the law was supposed to be implemented, community colleges “still lack a uniform policy for the awarding of course credit for military education, training and experience.”
The Senate passed Roth’s bill, SB 1071, requiring community colleges at the district level to create a consistent policy aimed at awarding veterans credit. Another bill, AB 1002, passed in 2021, was aimed at the CSU and UC systems.
Cahill said he is frustrated to see Newsom only now promoting what had been signed into law before he took office.
“The delay meant that thousands of veterans got no college credit,” he said.
Advocates say that efforts to improve and expand credit for prior learning will benefit the larger student population outside the military. In fact, the 2020 study by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning found that when non-veteran students received credit for prior learning, nearly three-quarters completed their credential.
The Chancellor’s Office would like to see that change. It has set an ambitious goal of ensuring that at least 250,000 Californians receive credit for prior learning by 2030, with most of those credits going to non-veterans. The Mapping Articulated Pathways (MAP) Initiative supports community colleges in these efforts through training, technology and policy.
Streamlining the process for veterans to get credit for prior learning has sparked an effort to improve the system as a whole, according to Brent Foster, Cal State’s assistant vice chancellor and state university dean of academic programs. Each campus in the CSU system now has its own policy.
“That was the whole reason many of us went back to the drawing board with CPL,” Foster said.
Public colleges and universities now largely have their own policies for credit for prior learning. But that doesn’t mean it’s been fully implemented.
“It’s not a light switch you flip, and it just runs,” Foster said. “You have to make sure the bones are good.”
Counselors, faculty members and other staff are key in making sure that students even know that they might be eligible for the credit. The 2018 survey by the Chancellor’s Office found that the main barrier was a lack of awareness.
“It’s an important reminder as we intake students,” Foster said, “that we need to look at the whole student and what kinds of experiences might help them graduate faster and save money.”
At Cal Poly Pomona, that means that administrators involved in promoting credit for prior learning have been holding discussions with groups on campus, such as faculty, department chairs and advisers to get feedback, and, perhaps most importantly, a buy-in, according to José Lozano, articulation officer in the Cal Poly Pomona registrar’s office.
Changes at Cal Poly Pomona have come too late for Keeney to avoid taking classes she didn’t need. To save money, she ended up finishing her senior year through an online college. But her story became a case study for improving the credit for prior learning process — not just at Cal Poly but other CSU and community college campuses, according to Elke Azpeitia, director of the Veterans Resource Center at Cal Poly Pomona.
Keeney said beyond policy, it’s important that people inside the system understand why credit for prior learning is so important.
“I think having allies in universities who see value in education that isn’t just structured in a college scenario or university scenario,” Keeney said. “That’s a big thing.”
Riverside County teachers collaboratively learn with the Riverside County Office of Education math team around increasing student thinking.
Credit: Riverside County Office of Education
When I became president of the California State Board of Education in 1975 for the first of two stints in this role (1975–82), three different offices created state curriculum frameworks, instructional materials and assessments, without much coordination or integration. In the five decades since, I’ve seen the state make significant progress in aligning K–12 policies — including those that govern finance, English learners, career/technical education, teacher preparation, accountability, postsecondary preparation, and more — to form a system where the various parts do work together.
But alignment alone is not enough for successful student learning and measurable academic growth. For example, Common Core math adopted by the State Board of Education in 2013 failed at the essential last mile of implementation by not providing the capacity for teachers and principals to teach the new math framework. As I reflected on my eight-year presidency of the board ending in 2019, I concluded we ended up with some islands of deeply rooted and changed math teaching, but mostly deserts where math teaching never changed significantly.
In 2014, the board approved the English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework and in 2023 a new math framework. Now, state educators must focus on the next step. To successfully implement both academic frameworks, we will need effective, aligned, sustained professional development that can reach and strengthen the entire teacher workforce.
Scaling up means ensuring that every teacher in California has, on an ongoing basis:
Adequate time to prepare lessons
Opportunities to continually learn in math topic areas as well as best practices in teaching
Opportunities to collaborate with other teachers while on the job
Access to models of effective teaching
Access to coaching and expert support
Time for reflection, feedback and revision
This kind of professional development has been implemented on a large scale in Ontario, Canada; Singapore; South Korea; and Japan.
To better serve our students and realize the goals of our math and English language arts standards requires substantial shifts on the part of teachers and instructional leaders. The state must make a sustained investment to make this happen. The new 2023 math framework, for example, calls for students to explain and justify their reasoning, grasp concepts, and make connections between different solutions in a much deeper manner than was the case in the No Child Left Behind era. Teachers’ instruction will likely improve only if they have developed relatively sophisticated visions of high-quality mathematics teaching. Teachers need rapid feedback mechanisms and the ability to continually measure how well each student is learning.
These are no small tasks to reach 9,700 principals and 319, 000 teachers in California. The local district is the first entity one would typically look toward in coordinating efforts to build teachers’ capacity to implement standards-aligned instruction. But most districts in California are quite small. Larger districts lack the necessary staff development capacity in-house, especially since staff support must be thorough and sustained.
Each state needs to devise its own strategies for how to best build and sustain the infrastructure for a dramatic upgrade in local instructional capacity. California has set policies and oversees the preparation of new teachers primarily through the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC). The state needs to expand the scope of the CTC, Department of Education, and California Collaborative for Educational Excellence to include current teachers starting with early career teachers, and scaling up to more experienced teachers. We can also learn from successful approaches that have taken hold in other states.
The Newsom administration has invested in service scholarships and residencies to recruit and retain better-prepared teachers and, while these show considerable promise, they were funded with one-time money and have thus far not increased in scale to provide a large enough supply of new teachers. Districts and county offices also need support to train and coach in-service teachers. The state has recently directed funds to a county office and the state Mathematics Project to train coaches for districts so that they can establish ongoing embedded professional learning for their teachers. This, too, is a promising start, but unlikely to be sufficient to meet the enormous statewide demand for assistance.
Because human and organizational capacity building at the local level is expensive and difficult to carry out, technology and digital platforms must be designed to lower the costs. For example, students could be taught using individualized technology packages during a part of a school day, while teachers are released to attend a few hours of professional development that would otherwise necessitate the hiring of substitute teachers. Online video coaching for math teaching has already proved effective in districts such as Lost Hills in Kern County, which has shown double-digit gains in math proficiency levels for their students following such coaching,
Some critics call for more state control of what happens after teachers close the classroom door. But there is no obvious path or mechanism to exert enough state control in hundreds of thousands of classrooms for top-down implementation of the series of complex instructional shifts called for by the curriculum frameworks. Advocating for the state to take an expanded interest in ensuring and coordinating local teacher training is not equivalent to explicit state control over how a teacher goes about delivering that instruction. The latter would likely achieve minimal local buy-in and could undermine the flexibility teachers need to meet the needs of different students with distinctive strategies. Instead, schools and teachers must internalize the new standards as their own and not perceive them as an intrusion. History and current research clearly demonstrate that standards-based implementation is unlikely to be advanced by additional regulations, mandates and sanctions from the top down. Teacher support for complex instruction instead must be constructed from the bottom up. California can achieve new policies that drive classroom improvement by supporting internal and revamped external school accountability, encouraging collaborative teamwork and funding sustained, ongoing professional learning.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
The LGBTQ+ community rallies in solidarity, opposing the Social Studies Alive! ban in Temecula Valley Unified in June 2023.
Credit: Mallika Seshadri / EdSource
This week’s executive order by President Donald Trump disingenuously titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” is a brazen assault on our educational freedoms and civil rights. The order directs the secretary of education and other department heads to develop a plan to terminate federal funds that directly or indirectly support classroom instruction on systemic racism or provide supportive school services and protections to transgender youth.
The order’s sweeping definition of what it calls “discriminatory equity ideology” could lead to a ban on teaching about slavery, segregation, redlining, voter suppression and other historical realities that continue to shape life and opportunity in America today. The order could also result in a ban on ethnic studies, gender studies, queer studies and other rigorous academic disciplines that prepare students to think critically and to live in a multicultural, multiracial society.
Equally troubling is the order’s attack on transgender students and the educators who support them. By directing the attorney general and federal prosecutors to coordinate investigations and prosecutions against educators who provide basic support to transgender students, like psychological counseling, or who use the student’s preferred pronouns, the order puts already vulnerable students at grave risk.
Put this all together and what results is a stunning proposal for a federal takeover of local education, where the president of the United States dictates what local schools can teach and which type of student belongs in our classrooms. It is also another attempt by President Trump and many of his right-wing supporters to purge our nation’s history of uncomfortable truths and erase the lived experience of people of color, women and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
While the potential consequences of this order are staggering to imagine, the most effective way to resist it is clear: Schools, educators and communities should not cave in to threats and intimidation and rush to voluntarily comply with this likely unconstitutional and unlawful order. Stay the course, partner with students, families and community organizations, and resist unless and until the courts have authorized any aspect of these outlandish proposals.
Trump tried something similar and failed in his last days of his first presidential term by issuing Executive Order 13950, which prohibited federal agencies and grant recipients from conducting trainings that included “divisive concepts” such as systemic racism, white privilege and unconscious bias. The order was blocked by a court in Northern California on First Amendment and Fifth Amendment grounds and later rescinded by the Biden administration.
Similar attempts to censor classroom discussion and discriminate against transgender students have also faced legal challenges in states across the country, and most challenges have prevailed. Courts have generally protected local control and academic freedom as essential to democracy and have struck down restrictions on federal funding that essentially coerce states to the point of compulsion. Multiple federal statutes dating back to the founding of the U.S. Department of Education, including the bipartisan-supported Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, also prohibit federal officials from controlling specific instructional content or curriculum, and expressly leave such decisions to state and local officials.
Even if there are legal setbacks, it will take time, perhaps years, for the courts to resolve these issues. In the meantime, schools have a legal and moral obligation to protect all students and provide an inclusive and honest education. They should stand firm while legal challenges proceed.
But the fight for educational justice belongs to all of us, not just to lawyers — and it requires a broader movement. Students, parents, educators and community leaders must speak out and stand firm against this dangerous attack on our values. Together, we must continue to make the public case for inclusive education. This includes sharing stories of how discussions of history and identity have transformed our classrooms and our life journeys. Documenting the positive and life-saving impact of supporting LGBTQ+ students. Helping parents understand why preparing diverse teachers to work with students of all backgrounds makes education better for everyone. And importantly, we must document the harm this order would cause to students’ educational experiences. These stories and voices — not just legal arguments in court — will ultimately determine whether we can build schools that truly serve all students.
In the meantime, stand firm, keep supporting all students and continue teaching truth.
•••
Guillermo Mayer is president and CEO of Public Advocates, a nonprofit law firm and advocacy organization that challenges the systemic causes of poverty and racial discrimination by strengthening community voices in public policy and achieving tangible legal victories advancing education, housing, transportation equity and climate justice.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Cal State Long Beach lecturer Casey Goeller wants his students to know how to use AI before they enter the workforce.
Tasmin McGill/EdSource
Since Open AI’s release of ChatGPT in 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots and models have found their way into the California college systems. These AI tools include language models and image generators that provide responses and images based on user prompts.
Many college professors have spoken out against AI’s use in college coursework, citing concerns of cheating, inaccurate responses, student overreliance on the tool, and, as a consequence, diminished critical thinking. Universities across the U.S. have implemented AI-detecting software like Turnitin to prevent cheating through the use of AI tools.
However, some professors have embraced the use of generative AI and envision its integration into curricula and research in various disciplines. To these professors, students learning how to use AI is critical to their future careers.
An October 2024 report from the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business found that 38% of the school’s faculty use AI in their classrooms.
Ramandeep Randhawa, professor of business administration and data science at USC, was one of the report’s 26 co-authors and organized the effort.
“As companies increasingly integrate AI into their workflows, it is critical to prepare students for this AI-first environment by enabling them to use this technology meaningfully and ethically,” Randhawa said. “Universities, as bastions of knowledge, must lead the way by incorporating AI into their curricula.”
All in on AI
At California State University, Long Beach, gerontology lecturer Casey Goeller has incorporated AI into his course assignments since fall 2023.
Students enter Goeller’s Perspectives on Gerontology course with various levels of experience with AI. By asking students for a show of hands, Goeller estimates the class is usually evenly split, with some students having no experience, others having dabbled with it and some who have used it extensively.
Goeller aims to help students understand how AI can be beneficial to them academically, whether it be assisting with brainstorming, organizing, or acting as a 24/7 on-call tutor.
To achieve this, Goeller’s assignments include students using an AI tool of their choice to address his feedback on their essays based on criteria such as content, flow and plagiarism concerns. Another assignment, worth 15% of their grade, emphasizes the importance of prompt engineering by having students use AI-generated questions to interview an older person in their life.
While Goeller gets a lot of questions from fellow faculty members about how AI works and how to implement it, he also hears plenty of hesitation.
“There’s a lot of faculty who’s still riding a horse to work, I call it,” Goeller said. “One of them said, ‘I am never going to use AI. It’s just not going to happen.’ I said, ‘What you should do if you think you can get away with that is tomorrow morning, get up really early and stop the sun from coming up, because that’s how inevitable AI is.’”
Goeller heeds the difficulties in establishing a conclusive way to incorporate AI into curricula due to different academic disciplines and styles of learning, but he does recognize the growing presence of AI in the workforce. Today, AI is filling various roles across industries, from analyzing trends in newsrooms and grocery stores, to generating entertainment, a point of contention for SAG-AFTRA members during 2023’s Hollywood strikes.
“If we don’t help our students understand AI before they escape this place, they’re going to get into the workforce where it’s there,” Goeller said. “If they don’t know anything about it or are uncomfortable with it, they’re at a disadvantage compared to a student with the same degree and knowledge of AI.”
California State University, Northridge, journalism lecturer Marta Valier has students use ChatGPT to write headlines, interview questions and video captions in her Multimedia Storytelling and Multi-platform Storytelling classes due to the inevitability of AI in the workforce.
The goal of the implementation is to teach students how AI algorithms operate and how journalists can use AI to assist their work. Not using it, she said, “would be like not using ink.”
“I absolutely want students to experiment with AI because, in newsrooms, it is used. In offices, it is used,” Valier said. “It’s just a matter of understanding which tools are useful, for what and where human creativity is still the best and where AI can help.”
AI tools such as ChatGPT and Copilot are frequently updated, so Valier emphasizes flexibility when teaching about these technological topics.
“I basically change my curriculum every day,” Valier said. “I think it reminds me as a professional that you need to constantly adapt to new technology because it’s going to change very fast. It’s very important to be open, to be curious about what technology can bring us and how it can help us.”
However, Valier acknowledges the issues of AI in terms of data privacy and providing factual responses. She reminds students that it is their responsibility to make sure the information ChatGPT provides is accurate by doing their own research or rechecking results, and to avoid reliance on the platform.
“Be very careful with personal information,” Valier said. “Especially if you have sources, or people that you want to protect, be very careful putting names and information that is sensitive.”
Valier sees a clear difference in the quality of work produced by students who combine AI with their own skills, versus those who rely entirely on artificial intelligence.
“You can tell when the person uses ChatGPT and stays on top of it, and when GPT takes over,” Valier said. “What I am really interested in is the point of view of the student, so when GPT takes over, there is no point of view. Even if [a student] doesn’t have the best writing, the ideas are still there.”
Balancing AI use in the classroom
Many AI-friendly instructors seek to strike a balance between AI-enriched assignments and AI-free assignments.
At USC, professors are encouraged to develop AI policies for each of their classes. Professors can choose between two approaches, as laid out in the school’s instructor guidelines for AI use: “Embrace and Enhance” or “Discourage and Detect.”
Bobby Carnes, an associate professor of clinical accounting at USC, has adopted a balance between both approaches while teaching Introduction to Financial Accounting.
“I use it all the time, so it doesn’t make sense to tell (students) they can’t use it,” Carnes said.
An avid user of AI tools like ChatGPT, USC associate professor of clinical accounting Bobby Carnes encourages AI experimentation for some assignments, but prohibits students from using it on exams. (Christina Chkarboul/EdSource)
Carnes uses AI to refine his grammar in personal and professional work and to develop questions for tests.
“I giveChatGPTthe information that I taught in the class, and then I can ask, ‘What topics haven’t I covered with these exam questions?’ It can help provide a more rich or robust exam,” Carnes said.
He doesn’t allow students to use AI in exams that test for practical accounting skills, though.
“You need that baseline, but we’re trying to get students to be at that next level, to see the big picture,” he said.
Carnes said he wants his students to take advantage of AI tools that are already changing the field, while mastering the foundational skills they’ll need to become financial managers and leaders.
“The nice thing about accounting is that the jobs just become more interesting (with AI), where there’s not as much remedial tasks,” Carnes said.
Preserving foundational learning
Olivia Obeso, professor of education and literacy at California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, believes establishing foundational knowledge and critical thinking skills through AI-free teaching is non-negotiable.
Obeso enforces her own no ChatGPT/AI usage policy in her Foundations of K-8 Literacy Teaching class to prepare her students for challenges in their post-collegiate life.
“AI takes out the opportunity to engage in that productive struggle,” Obeso said. “That means my students won’t necessarily understand the topics as deeply or develop the skills they need.”
Obeso is also concerned about ChatGPT’s environmental impact: For an in-class activity at the start of the fall 2024 semester, she asked students to research the software’s energy and water use.
The energy required to power ChatGPT emits 8.4 tons of carbon dioxide per year, according to Earth.Org. The average passenger vehicle produces 5 tons per year. Asking ChatGPT 20-50 questions uses 500 millliters (16.9) ounces of water, the size of a standard plastic water bottle.
By the end of the exercise, Obeso said her students became “experts” on ethical considerations concerning AI, sharing their findings with the class through a discussion on what they read, how they felt and whether they had new concerns about using AI.
“You are a student and you are learning how to operate in this world, hold yourselves accountable,” Obeso said.
Jessica Odden, a senior majoring in child development, said Obeso’s class helped them understand AI use in the classroom as an aspiring teacher.
“For people that are using (AI) in the wrong ways, it makes people reassess how people might be using it, especially in classes like this where we are training to become teachers,” Odden said. “What are you going to do when you actually have to lesson-plan yourself?”
Odden makes sure she sticks to learning the fundamentals of teaching herself so that she will be prepared for her first job.
AI in curricula
At the University of California, San Diego, some faculty members have echoed a concern for AI’s infringement upon independent learning.
Academic coordinator Eberly Barnes is interested in finding a middle ground that incorporates AI into curricula where it complements students’ critical thinking, rather than replaces it.
Barnes oversees the analytical writing program, Making of the Modern World (MMW), where her responsibilities include revising the course’s policy of AI use in student work.
The current policy enables students to use AI to stimulate their thinking, reading and writing for their assignments. However, it explicitly prohibits the use of the software to replace any of the aforementioned skills or the elaboration of the written piece itself.
Despite the encouraged use of AI, Barnes expressed her own hesitancy about the role of AI in the field of social sciences and the research and writing skills needed to work within it.
“One of the goals in MMW is to teach critical thinking and also to teach academic writing. And the writing is embedded in the curriculum. You’re not going to learn to write if you’re just going to machine,” Barnes said. “The policy is inspired by the fact that we don’t think there’s any way to stop generative AI use.”
When Barnes designs the writing prompts for the second and third series in the MMW program, she collaborates with teaching assistants to make assignment prompts incompatible with AI analysis and reduce the likelihood that students will seek out AI’s help for passing grades.
“Students feel absolutely obsessed with grades and are very pressured to compete,” Barnes said. “That’s been around. I mean it is definitely worse here at UCSD than it was at other colleges and universities that I’ve been at.”
A tool, not a cheat code
Dr. Celeste Pilegard
Celeste Pilegard is a professor of cognitive science and educational psychology at UCSD. She has been teaching introductory research methods since 2019, focusing on foundational topics that will prepare students for higher-level topics in the field.
Educators like Pilegard have been struggling to adapt after the widespread adoption of AI tools.
“For me and a lot of professors, there’s fear,” Pilegard said. “We’re holding onto the last vestiges, hoping this isn’t going to become the thing everyone is using.”
Pilegard is concerned that students rely on AI tools to easily pass their intro-level courses, leaving them without a firm understanding of the content and an inability to properly assess AI’s accuracy.
“It’s hard to notice what is real and what is fake, what is helpful and what is misguided,” Pilegard said. “When you have enough expertise in an area, it’s possible to use ChatGPT as a thinking tool because you can detect its shortcomings.”
However, Pilegard does believe AI can assist in learning. She likens the current situation with AI to the advent of statistical analysis software back in the 1970s, which eliminated the need to do calculations by hand.
At that time, many professors argued for the importance of students doing work manually to comprehend the foundations. However, these tools are now regularly used in the classroom with the acceptance and guidance of educators.
”I don’t want to be the stick in the mud in terms of artificial intelligence,” Pilegard said. “Maybe there are some things that aren’t important for students to be doing themselves. But when the thing you’re offloading onto the computer is building the connections that help you build expertise, you’re really missing an opportunity to be learning deeply.”
We’ve been receiving a lot of questions lately about how Wowzers can be used with Google Classroom. Google Classroom is a fantastic tool that helps students and teachers organize assignments, boost collaboration, and foster better communication, particularly for virtual learning. By assigning work from one central platform, teachers and students can easily find all their assignments, grades, and feedback in one location. We’ve put together some suggestions and tips on how to best incorporate Wowzers into this tool.
Assign work through Google Classroom
The first step is to assign specific content to students through Google Classroom. This can be a particular activity, section, or amount of time. For example, one of our teachers who currently uses Google Classroom often assigns, “Complete at least one lesson, game, and assessment in Wowzers.” This allows students to follow their own personalized curriculum path, but keeps all students moving at the same pace so no one gets left behind. When a student completes that assignment, they can mark it off as complete so you know it’s time to check their report. At that point, you can immediately review math concepts together using a digital whiteboard, if needed.
Open a line of feedback
Google Classroom allows students and teachers to communicate about particular assignments. Encourage students to provide feedback about each lesson. Was it too hard, too easy? Did they understand the content? Use this feedback to adjust the student’s curriculum path as needed, such as assigning an extra remediation video to reinforce a concept, or even moving them back to review a previous concept. Similarly, be sure to communicate back to your students. Congratulate them when they’re thriving or completing extra work, and provide support when they struggle. Let them know when you’re rewarding them with extra Wowzers coins.
To keep a record of this communication, you can open up a private Google doc with each student and attach it directly to the assignment in Google Classroom. You could also consider using a digital whiteboard to review concepts and collaborate. To review a student’s progress, share your screen with the student, and go over their recent reports. It’s even possible to use tools such as Google Docs to group students into a collaborative discussion. This allows all students can participate and contribute.
Provide supplemental activities
Did you know Wowzers includes offline activities, worksheets, discussion questions, and projects as well? These supplemental materials are available as PDFs, which can be attached to an assignment in Google Classroom. You could even use Google Docs or Google Slides to have students work together as a group and prepare a write-up or presentation of their project to share with the rest of the class. Using the rubrics available in Wowzers, you can grade these supplemental activities directly in Google Classroom.
Do you use Google Classroom alongside Wowzers? We’d love to hear your tips and tricks as well!
