Det är dags att börja hålla koll på de lite mer oväntade områden där datorer håller på att bli bättre än människor, och framför allt där folk föredrar datorer (eller robotar) framför människor.
Ett av dem är uppsatsskrivning i skolan.
Studenter skriver mer och reviderar fler gånger om det är ett datorprogram som ger dem feedback, och inte en lärare, enligt The Hechinger report:
Instructors at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have been using a program called E-Rater in this fashion since 2009, and they’ve observed a striking change in student behavior as a result. Andrew Klobucar, associate professor of humanities at NJIT, notes that students almost universally resist going back over material they’ve written. But, Klobucar told Inside Higher Ed reporter Scott Jaschik, his students are willing to revise their essays, even multiple times, when their work is being reviewed by a computer and not by a human teacher. They end up writing nearly three times as many words in the course of revising as students who are not offered the services of E-Rater, and the quality of their writing improves as a result. Crucially, says Klobucar, students who feel that handing in successive drafts to an instructor wielding a red pen is “corrective, even punitive” do not seem to feel rebuked by similar feedback from a computer.
Det finns lite mer detaljerade studier gjorda på ett program som heter Criterion, och som pekar på att studenternas språk blev enklare (vilket skulle kunna vara en anpassning till deras tänkta modell av datorprogrammets förståelse) men också att de reflekterade mer över sina texter, vilket väl måste tolkas enbart positivt.
The computer program appeared to transform the students’ approach to the process of receiving and acting on feedback, El Ebyary and Windeatt report. Comments and criticism from a human instructor actually had a negative effect on students’ attitudes about revision and on their willingness to write, the researchers note. By contrast, interactions with the computer produced overwhelmingly positive feelings, as well as an actual change in behavior — from “virtually never” revising, to revising and resubmitting at a rate of 100 percent. As a result of engaging in this process, the students’ writing improved; they repeated words less often, used shorter, simpler sentences, and corrected their grammar and spelling. These changes weren’t simply mechanical. Follow-up interviews with the study’s participants suggested that the computer feedback actually stimulated reflectiveness in the students — which, notably, feedback from instructors had not done.
/Simon
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