America Is In A Literacy Crisis Is Ai The Solution Or Part Of The

Reading levels dropped to historic lows during the pandemic. Now parents, teachers and tech companies are hoping AI can help solve America’s literacy crisis. America’s literacy challenge has been building for years, with reading scores sliding even before the pandemic pushed them to their lowest levels in decades. Educators said potential factors include children’s increased screen time, shortened attention spans and a decline in reading longer-form writing. Mississippi, Louisiana and other states have experimented with shaking up reading curricula and passing laws aimed at improving childhood literacy. But the rise of artificial intelligence is creating another opportunity to reimagine how students learn to read.

Across the US, parents, educators, and community groups are trying AI-powered tutors that listen as children read, correct mistakes in real time and adapt lessons to each student’s reading level — though questions remain... Denver Public Schools made headlines in recent years for embracing AI products, both as teaching tools and as teacher supports. The system of roughly 200 schools began working with Amira Learning, a company that specializes in AI reading tutors, in January. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their... High-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search); recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix); virtual assistants (e.g., Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo); generative and...

However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI: "A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough... Various subfields of AI research are centered around particular goals and the use of particular tools. The traditional goals of AI research include learning, reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, natural language processing, perception, and support for robotics.[a] To reach these goals, AI researchers have adapted and integrated a wide range of... Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956,[6] and the field went through multiple cycles of optimism throughout its history,[7][8] followed by periods of disappointment and loss of funding, known as AI... Generative AI's ability to create and modify content has led to several unintended consequences and harms. Ethical concerns have been raised about AI's long-term effects and potential existential risks, prompting discussions about regulatory policies to ensure the safety and benefits of the technology.

The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been broken into subproblems. These consist of particular traits or capabilities that researchers expect an intelligent system to display. The traits described below have received the most attention and cover the scope of AI research.[a] Illustrations by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff This month, average reading scores for high school seniors — released by the Nation’s Report Card — fell to their lowest level since 1992. It was the first time that 12th graders had taken the test since the COVID pandemic, and the results showed a widening gap between the highest- and lowest-achieving students.

While it may be tempting to chalk up the decline in reading skills to COVID learning loss, the scores continue a slide that predates the pandemic, according to Martin West, academic dean and a... “American students’ literacy skills peaked in roughly the middle of the last decade and have fallen significantly since that time,” he said. In this episode of “Harvard Thinking,” host Samantha Laine Perfas, along with West and other guests, discuss what might be driving the decline and possible strategies for reversing it. West brought up one theory, sparked by a recent report that showed a dwindling number of teens are reading for pleasure. “What could be driving that trend?” he asked. “I don’t think we have smoking gun evidence that the rise of screen-based childhood is a direct contributor to the literacy trends that we’re seeing.

But I’m willing to put it very high on my list of potential suspects.” Lucy Calkins was an education superstar. Now she’s cast as the reason a generation of students struggles to read. Can she reclaim her good name? Until a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, a minor deity. Thousands of U.S.

schools used her curriculum, called Units of Study, to teach children to read and write. Two decades ago, her guiding principles—that children learn best when they love reading, and that teachers should try to inspire that love—became a centerpiece of the curriculum in New York City’s public schools. Her approach spread through an institute she founded at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and traveled further still via teaching materials from her publisher. Many teachers don’t refer to Units of Study by name. They simply say they are “teaching Lucy.” Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

But now, at the age of 72, Calkins faces the destruction of everything she has worked for. A 2020 report by a nonprofit described Units of Study as “beautifully crafted” but “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The criticism became impossible to ignore two years... (The National Assessment of Educational Progress—a test administered by the Department of Education—found in 2022 that roughly one-third of fourth and eighth graders are unable to read at the “basic” level for their age.) In Sold a Story, the reporter Emily Hanford argued that teachers had fallen for a single, unscientific idea—and that its persistence was holding back American literacy. The idea was that “beginning readers don’t have to sound out words.” That meant teachers were no longer encouraging early learners to use phonics to decode a new word—to say cuh-ah-tuh for “cat,” and... Instead, children were expected to figure out the word from the first letter, context clues, or nearby illustrations.

But this “cueing” system was not working for large numbers of children, leaving them floundering and frustrated. The result was a reading crisis in America. For Lisa Parry, a 12th-grade teacher in South Dakota, the students' essays were getting stale. Her solution: get the students to turn to ChatGPT ‒ which serves up fresh ideas. Before her students could decide on what to write for their book report on "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal," Parry told them to ask the artificial intelligence chatbot to... Parry's class had finished reading the book and she didn't want to read another essay about the effects of fast food on the human body, a common prompt that her past students had used.

The AI chatbot prompted one student to write about how McDonald's uses sugar in its food products, which intrigued Parry. To her, that idea was more distinctive than many students' ideas. She encouraged the student to take the AI chatbot's suggestion and write about that topic. The skills that students will need in an age of automation are precisely those that are eroded by inserting AI into the educational process. After three years of doing essentially nothing to address the rise of generative AI, colleges are now scrambling to do too much. Over the summer, Ohio State University, where I teach, announced a new initiative promising to “embed AI education into the core of every undergraduate curriculum, equipping students with the ability to not only use...

Administrators understandably want to “future proof” their graduates at a time when the workforce is rapidly transforming. But such policies represent a dangerously hasty and uninformed response to the technology. Based on the available evidence, the skills that future graduates will most need in the AI era—creative thinking, the capacity to learn new things, flexible modes of analysis—are precisely those that are likely to... Before embarking on a wholesale transformation, the field of higher education needs to ask itself two questions: What abilities do students need to thrive in a world of automation? And does the incorporation of AI into education actually provide those abilities? The skills needed to thrive in an AI world might counterintuitively be exactly those that the liberal arts have long cultivated.

Students must be able to ask AI questions, critically analyze its written responses, identify possible weaknesses or inaccuracies, and integrate new information with existing knowledge. The automation of routine cognitive tasks also places greater emphasis on creative human thinking. Students must be able to envision new solutions, make unexpected connections, and judge when a novel concept is likely to be fruitful. Finally, students must be comfortable and adept at grasping new concepts. This requires a flexible intelligence, driven by curiosity. Perhaps this is why the unemployment rate for recent art-history graduates is half that of recent computer-science grads.

Ashanty Rosario: I’m a high schooler. AI is demolishing my education. A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook Yawp \yôp\ n: 1: a raucous noise 2: rough vigorous language"I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." Walt Whitman, 1855. About | Contributors | Press | Teaching Materials | Who Pays for This?

Print Copies (Vol. I; Vol. II) | PDFs (Vol. I; Vol. II) While those in education understand the current state of the nation’s literacy crisis, most everyday Americans are dangerously unaware.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, nearly 130 million American adults read below a sixth-grade level. Now, consider how that number represents more than half the adult U.S. population. That’s not surprising, according to the most recent “Nation’s Report Card” by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The NAEP reports that roughly just one-third of students in fourth, eighth and 12th grades are proficient in reading and have “solid academic performance and demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter.”

In fact, this U.S. reading crisis has been 20 years in the making. While one-third of students are considered proficient, the statistics are even more alarming for various demographics, such as low-income students, students of color and students with disabilities. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a growing “digital divide” in which those without access to supportive learning programs and teachers will continue to slide through the cracks. The first step in solving a problem is seeing it clearly. This article, part one of an ongoing series, defines the broad scope and depth of the literacy crisis in the United States, among both children and adults.

Future installments will address the complex ecosystem of schools, government agents, nonprofits, and more that are tackling this challenge; survey librarians on what they are doing to improve literacy in their communities; and highlight... According to the International Literacy Association, there are 781 million people in the world who are either illiterate (cannot read a single word) or functionally illiterate (with a basic or below basic ability to... Some 126 million of them are young people. That accounts for 12 percent of the world’s population. This is not just a problem in developing countries. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), 21 percent of adults in the United States (about 43 million) fall into the illiterate/functionally illiterate category.

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