The Purpose of Education in an AI world

Education in an AI world

I am delighted to be here with such an esteemed company as we explore the possibilities and challenges facing education in an increasing AI world.

For us at InnerDrive, the purpose of education is to help students be all they can be and equip them to be part of society.

But we don’t know what this society will look like. With the rapid change and advancements in technology, the likes of which we haven’t seen before, we face an increasingly uncertain future. And in a world of uncertainty, we have to draw on what we will remain the same—the constants, the common denominators. And one thing we know won’t change any time soon is human cognitive architecture. That is, our ability to learn and how we do so.

If we believe the maxim that memory is the residue of thought, that is, that students learn what they think hard about, this opens up a world of opportunity from cog sci research to improve teaching and learning. This includes areas such as Cognitive Load Theory, Retrieval Practice, Spacing and Interleaving. These desirable difficulties encourage students to mentally wrestle with the content. And in doing so, it helps cement knowledge in their long-term memory.

And yet AI can appear to remove some of the need to think hard. It looks like it can do the thinking for us. It can produce the output at a much quicker rate than humans can. And this speed and convenience can come at the expense of students thinking about how to do the process. Prioritising product over process is a mistake.

Consider three recent studies. The first, a randomised control trial from last year showed that students remembered less in their final exams if they had studied using ChatGPT. The second, a meta-analysis released last month showed that students reported putting in less effort to their work if they were assisted by Chat GPT, and finally, only last week a study was released showing that students become “‘”metacognitively lazy” when using ChatGPT as they often failed to interrogate the outcome given to them by it. This, for me, is arguably the biggest challenge facing education right now.

And yet, there are some positive glimmers. Early research around personal tutors, for example, has shown big potential for improving learning. And areas such as feedback and lesson planning, though not there yet, show some potential promise.

So returning to the original question, what is the purpose of education? Perhaps in an age of AI, the purpose of education is to help students gain knowledge and appreciate how to accumulate this knowledge in an ever-changing world. If we do that, we equip them to be adaptable in a future we do not yet know.