How teachers can learn from artificial intelligence | Education - Brookings Institution

The media has written extensively about artificial intelligence (AI), fretting about how it will replace humans in almost every job and be the demise of human civilization, says Alina von Davier, Senior Vice President - ACTNext, Adjunct Professor - Fordham University and Esther Care, Senior Fellow - Global Economy and Development, Center for Universal Education.

But on a more positive note, we have gained a lot from machines and “AI-augmented” humans, from sensors to prosthetics to gene editing. Little attention, though, has been given to the more modest, but potentially impactful, knowledge transfer from machines to humans: teaching, learning, and assessment in schools.

We are referring to the deconstruction of complex human behavior into educational strategies that teachers can deploy in their classrooms. Machines can study and measure behavior in a way that the contributing cognitive and social processes that are part of children’s behavior are identifiable.

Complementing these learnings from AI, big data can also provide us with a way of deconstructing complex behaviors, or in other words, pulling complex behaviors apart to understand each contributing part. This is of course not a skill confined to AI. Teachers themselves can and do engage in these activities to understand the depth and nature of what they are teaching—and assessing.
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Source: Brookings Institution