Should We Use ChatGPT to Make Literature Accessible to Students?

            In this Boston Globe article, MG Prezioso (Harvard University) tees off on teachers who are using AI tools like ChatGPT to simplify texts for students. “As an education researcher, I understand the appeal of AI-adapted texts,” she says. “Classrooms play host to students with a range of language and literacy skills, and AI-adapted materials, which can be translated and tailored to each individual’s reading level, allow students to access the same content – along with supplementary resources, like discussion questions and vocabulary words – at their own pace. This is especially valuable in social studies and the sciences, where information is a prerequisite for conceptual understanding.” But Prezioso has several concerns:

            • Watered-down language – AI-generated text tends to be syntactically repetitive and stylistically flat, she says. Students need to read complex and varied sentences to develop reading comprehension skills. “Why not use authentic texts with additional instructional support, like drawing on background knowledge or helping students break down meaning-filled, ‘juicy’ sentences instead?”

            • Artistic integrity – AI-modified works of fiction, essays, and memoirs can do violence to the original authors’ integrity.

            • Bias – “Can we really trust AI,” asks Prezioso, “with its racial and gender biases, to adapt a novel like Beloved– one that embodies not only Toni Morrison’s lyrical, enchanting style but also the complexities of the black experience?”

            • Love of reading – AI-processed texts simply don’t have the same ability to develop students’ appreciation of authors’ word choice, imagery, and character dialogue. Reading will be a chore, not a joy. “Divorcing a story from its style is like separating humans from atoms,” says Prezioso. “You can try, but if you were to succeed, you would create something entirely different.” There’s already a trend of fewer young people reading for fun, and AI is likely to make things worse.

            As an example, Prezioso takes a passage from the end of The Great Gatsby, a novel often used in high-school English classes:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Now here’s a ChatGPT rendition:

Gatsby believed in the green light, a symbol of the bright future he dreamed of. Each year, that future seemed to slip further away. It was out of reach then, but that didn’t stop him – tomorrow he would try harder, stretch further… and maybe one day, he would achieve it. So we keep moving forward, like boats trying to move against the current, always being pulled back into the past.

“The original is elegant, complex,” says Prezioso. “Its arrangement of words and syntax, from the expanded clauses to the ellipsis and dashes, embodies Gatsby’s yearning for the past, as well as our own faith in, and pursuit of, illusory dreams. The message is tragic, but its tone is  hopeful, leaving us to wonder: are we foolish for beating on, or is the honor in the attempt?” The AI-generated text, on the other hand, is rigid, mechanical, lacks complexity and tone, and distorts Fitzgerald’s message. 

            What makes the original meaningful is that it is “crafted by a person, a breathing, feeling person,” says Prezioso. “There is wisdom in human-crafted words, and it is hard-earned. We mustn’t overlook this wisdom. It’s why we read. It’s what we’ll lose. And it’s something AI will never provide.” 

 

“Teachers Are Using AI to Make Literature Easier for Students to Read. This Is a Terrible Idea” by MG Prezioso in The Boston Globe, April 13, 2025; Prezioso can be reached at mgprezioso@fas.harvard.edu.

 

Shifting Public Attitudes on Career and Technical Education (CTE)

            In her Editor’s Note in Kappan, Teresa Preston reports on a Populace survey revealing a dramatic shift in public opinion on the importance of career preparation versus college preparation by K-12 schools. Asked to rank-order 57 priorities for public schools, here’s the change from the 2019 to the 2022 survey:

• 2019:

-   College preparation ranked 10th

-   CTE ranked 27th

• 2022:

-   College preparation ranked 47th

-   CTE ranked 6th

 

“Prepared for What?” by Teresa Preston in Kappan, March 2023 (Vol. 104, #6, p. 4)

 

Using ChatGPT and Other Bots to Teach Better

            In this SSRN paper, Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) say that in the current debate on the uses and abuses of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs), educators haven’t paid enough attention to some important classroom applications. The authors identify five pedagogical strategies that are not used enough in classrooms because they are time-consuming and hard to implement – and show how the new bots can be helpful:

            • Generating examples to help students understand difficult and abstract concepts – The best way to explain new and challenging material is to give students a number of examples. “If students are presented with only one example,” say Mollick and Mollick, “they may focus on the superficial details of that example and not get at the deeper concept. Multiple examples of a single concept can help students decontextualize the idea from the example, leading to better recall and understanding.” 

Ideally, examples provide a real-world context, anchor abstract ideas in an analogy or story, ground concepts in engaging details, reveal complexity, highlight nuances, help students think critically, and support the transfer of learning to new situations. These demanding criteria show how difficult it is for teachers to generate enough high-quality examples. That’s where the bots come in. All a teacher needs to do is specify the concept, ask for varied examples, and describe the grade level of students and the style of writing required. Click on the full article below for examples on the concept of opportunity costs.

Of course the teacher needs to evaluate the examples generated: Are they factually correct? Are they relevant? Do they have enough detail? Will students find them interesting? Do they connect the abstract to the concrete? Having narrowed down to a good list of examples and presented them to a class, the teacher might then ask students what the examples have in common, have them compare and contrast several, and ask which different aspects of the concept each example highlights. 

            • Providing varied explanations and analogies to address student misconceptions – Clear explanations are central to good teaching, helping students build mental maps and achieve deeper understanding. But good explanations must be built on students’ prior knowledge, take into account likely misconceptions, plan a step-by-step approach with organizational cues so students can follow along, and provide concrete details and analogies. LLMs can tackle these exacting demands, quickly generating explanations and analogies for a specific grade level and level of understanding. See the article link for a suggested explanation of the concept of photosynthesis for elementary students. 

            • Producing low-stakes tests so students can practice retrieving information – Checking for understanding is a proven method of cementing material in long-term memory. But generating high-quality tests, quizzes, and mid-lesson “hinge” questions (to see if students are ready to move on to a new topic) is “an effortful task,” say Mollick and Mollick. LLMs can quickly generate diagnostic retrieval exercises. See the article link for examples of quizzes on U.S. history and high-school biology.

            • Assessing students’ knowledge gaps to guide instructors’ next steps – The best way for teachers to know what to do next is asking students questions like these: 

-   What is the most important idea or concept covered in class today?

-   Why do you think this idea is important?

-   What is the most difficult class concept so far?

-   What did you struggle to understand?

-   What concept or problem would you like to see explored in more detail?

LLMs can be asked to digest students’ responses to questions like these (perhaps in the middle of a class) and quickly generate an analysis of responses. See the article below for key points and areas of confusion on a lesson on BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement). 

            • Creating distributed practice exercises to reinforce learning – “Students need to practice retrieving information not just once but multiple times during a course,” say Mollick and Mollick. It’s also important for students to continuously make connections among the different concepts and skills they’ve learned. But even when students know about the value of distributed practice, they continue to “cram” for tests at the last minute, which means teachers must be intentional about distributing practice. To do so, teachers need to know:

-   What are the most important topics for students to remember?

-   Which connections between topics are critical and should be practiced often?

-   How often and when should students retrieve previously learned material?

-   What is the best spacing of assessments to allow just the right amount of forgetting?

-   When have students had enough practice?

LLMs can be very helpful designing and scheduling quick quizzes spread out over days, weeks, and months, providing an effective way to lodge concepts and skills in students’ long-term memory. See the article link for examples of distributed practice during a unit on the Enlightenment and the American Revolution. 

 

“Using AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including Prompts” by Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick in SSRN, March 17, 2023; the authors can be reached at emollick@wharton.upenn.edu and lmollick@gmail.com. 

An Online Course for Teens on Happiness

 from Marshall Memo: An Online Course for Teens on Happiness

            In this Washington Post article, Lindsey Bever reports on how the most popular course at Yale – Psychology and the Good Life – has been retooled into a free, online, six-week course for teenagers. It uses TikTok-length videos to highlight common misconceptions about happiness and teach about the behaviors, feelings, and thoughts that produce mental well-being. 

            There’s an urgent need for this kind of intervention, say mental health professionals, because U.S. adolescents are in a mental health crisis. It was in full swing before the pandemic; in 2019, 44 percent of high-school students reported persistent sadness or hopelessness, with nearly 20 percent saying they had considered suicide, and 9 percent attempting to end their lives. Covid-19 made things worse, with elevated levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, self-injury, and suicidal ideation. “The rites of passage for teenage-hood were disrupted,” says psychologist/author Mary Alvord. Young people missed out on parties, homecoming dances, graduation ceremonies, and everyday interactions with their peers. 

“We’re not taking care of our young people today if we’re not giving them strategies to navigate all the complex societal pressures that they face,” says Laurie Santos, the Yale psychology professor who taught the original happiness course. “We need to know the appropriate ways to listen to them and to react to them, so that we can understand the message that things like sadness or anxiety or anger might be sending and then channel them in an appropriate direction.” 

Santos filmed the lectures for the updated version of her Yale course before a group of high-school students and asked for their reactions and questions. Here are some of the key concepts in the teen course she and her colleagues created:

• Rethink what happiness means. Many teens believe they’ll be happy when they have 

the right partner, perfect grades, admission to the right college, popularity on social media, and money. “A lot of teenagers are trying to be happy,” says Santos, “but sometimes they’re going about it the wrong way or putting effort into the wrong things.” 

• Get out of yourself. The course focuses on the true sources of happiness for teens, which include making social connections, having a sense of free time (“time affluence”), being less self-centered and more other-oriented, volunteering their time, giving money to worthwhile causes, and doing random acts of kindness like opening a door for another person. 

• Learn self-compassion. Teens need to be taught how to tune out their inner critic – the thoughts that make them feel inferior and lead to self-sabotaging behaviors like procrastination – and think of themselves in more self-compassionate ways.

• Slow down the anxious voices in your head. The course provides tools to regulate emotions, such as intentionally engaging the senses. Santos asks, “What are five things you can see right now? What are four things you can hear right now? What are three things you can feel right now?”

The response to the course has been enthusiastic, with hundreds of thousands of teens clicking on the link and mental health professionals giving a thumbs-up. “If we can teach children and teens and adults to try to make changes to things they can control,” says Alvord, “they feel more empowered. If they feel more empowered, they feel more in control of their life. And if they feel more in control of their life, they’re not feeling helpless. Then they don’t tend to be depressed.” 

 

“Yale’s Hugely Popular Happiness Course Is Revamped for Teens” by Lindsey Bever in The Washington Post, January 29, 2023