AI Role in Education
|
Guest Article
Using AI to Facilitate Self-Regulated Learning (Kevin Gregorio)
Kevin Gregorio | LinkedIn
Guest Writer
Jun 24, 2024
Kevin Gregorio is the Director of Learning Services at St. Joseph’s Preparatory School in Philadelphia. Currently pursuing a PhD in Educational Psychology from The Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, Gregorio is passionate about and actively researching retrieval practice as a means of more effective learning. Ever since the Prep partnered with Flint in February 2024, Kevin has seen the ability of teachers to use Flint to encourage positive student outcomes and for students to use Flint to drive their own learning and leverage the perks of retrieval practice.
Retrieval fosters retention
AI for student-driven practice
Recently, however, my work in the classroom with Artificial Intelligence (AI) has given me hope. When first introduced to me in an Ed Psych graduate program, my professor encouraged us to experiment with AI as a self-testing tool. Chat GPT 3.5 proved invaluable in its ability to generate novel problems for me to test myself with (in accordance with the Retrieval literature) along with ample feedback and corrections when I struggled (also in accordance with the literature!).
Since then, a number of AI tools have made their way into schools and classrooms across the country. I’ve attended a number of conferences and talks where teachers outline how they’ve used Chat GPT and Large Language Models (LLMs) like it in their classroom; Khan Academy has implemented an AI tutor called Khanmigo; other tools like MagicSchool’s AI has a whole host of amazing tools and resources (especially for teachers!); Quizlet has incorporated two really impressive AI features, namely Q-chat and magic notes; and, most recently in my own experience, a tool called Flint.
While I’ve used and enjoyed all of these tools to some capacity, Flint in particular has stood out. A small start-up based in San Francisco, Flint is marketed as a K-12 AI tool. But having worked with it now for several months, I fear that description belies how profound of an impact I think the tool (and others like it) can make on education as a whole. In large part, because of its ability to facilitate self-regulated learning and Retrieval.
Using Flint to teach retrieval
When I and the teachers I’ve worked with first encountered Flint, we tended to see one obvious application: it’s great for making creative chat-based assignments. It generates the assignment, proposes some rules the AI will follow, proposes entire criteria for grading and feedback, and then, on the back end, gives students and teachers a profile of not only the students’ strengths and weaknesses on the assignment— but it provides a profile of strengths and weaknesses for the whole class. It’s truly profound. Not only does it deliver a highly rich and meaningful activity for the students, it provides actionable insight to the teacher on how to help students develop their strengths and weaknesses. That’s the most obvious application of the tool. But another, perhaps less obvious, application began to dawn on me.
Included in Flint is a “Friendly AI” chatbot designed for students to interact with. At first, I was skeptical of this feature for fear that students would simply use it to go directly to answers— to cheat, effectively. And they definitely did that. Once Flint made it possible for teachers to oversee how students were using the Friendly AI feature, that became apparent. But something else became apparent too. Something far less predictable to me. Students started to use Flint to test themselves. Some started to do it on their own. But many more followed them once I started to encourage it in class. They were finally using Retrieval!
Impact of using Flint’s AI for retrieval
What’s more, Retrieval with generative AI isn’t simply a practice test. It’s far more dynamic—and, I think— effective. An AI chatbot like Flint is able to ask students questions, change the difficulty level upon request, provide feedback and scaffolding, and challenge students to go beyond the rote memorization of facts by forcing them to explain concepts in their own words. Furthermore, it’s available to them 24/7, unlike an actual peer tutor or a teacher. If motivated, and taught to use it effectively, students can use these tools as often as they’d like. In other words, they can take control of their learning.
One student, in particular, became so engaged by Retrieval on Flint that he accredits it with getting him off of academic ineligibility. And his usage on Flint speaks to this. At first, he was only using Flint when specific assignments were given to him, but more and more you can see that he started to use Flint during his free time to test himself on classes he struggled in. In fact, he went from having multiple failing grades to having no grades below a 75% in just a few weeks.
This student’s story, and others like it, is an amazing proof of concept: AI can facilitate meaningful Retrieval and make students self-regulated learners. As a result, Flint, and AI tools like it, give me great hope for the future direction of technology’s role in education.