Presented by Dr Angela Stott (Physical Sciences, Education, University of the Free State) and Stefanus Scheepers (Education, University of the Free State) this seminar includes an interactive session on the use of AI and a demonstration of what students are doing with AI.
Prompts to use during the session: Improving Education with AI
Substitution
Explain Cognitive Load Theory in a way that it will be understandable for a first-year university student studying to become a foundation phase teacher
Augmentation
Provide a model answer for this question, which is part of a test for fourth-year education students preparing to teach at the high school level: Explain, in terms of the information processing model of learning, why a PowerPoint presentation should:
a) have keywords rather than full sentences (3)
b) use pictures where relevant (3)
c) have the presenter speaking, not reading. (3)
Prompt example 1
Create a rubric to evaluate an essay on Cognitive Load Theory written by fourth-year education students preparing to teach at the high school level. Give the rubric in a table format and make the total 50 marks.
Prompt example 2
This is an abstract for an academic article written for an academic journal. Rewrite it more concisely so that it is 200 words or fewer: Presenters’ pedagogical choices are strongly affected by their views whether knowledge is coherent or fragmented. This pragmatically conducted mixed-methods survey study seeks to contribute to epistemological discussions and associated pedagogical suggestions in the context of mole ratio related mistakes evident in Stoichiometry calculations performed by in-service teachers in the developing world. Data were collected from South African physical sciences teachers’ written solutions to four Stoichiometry calculation questions and comprise 361 sets of such solutions. Each of these was coded for the presence of types of mole ratio related mistakes, from which the consistency of each type of mistake could be determined across the four questions for each data set. Furthermore, the frequency of each type of mole ratio related mistake was determined per question to explore explanations for observed inconsistencies, drawing on an analysis of question difficulty and complexity. Additionally, queries were run to identify data sets of interest which were subjected to qualitative scrutiny regarding whether the observed mistakes may have been reasonable to the people who made them, and therefore categorizable as errors, rather than slips, despite their inconsistent application. The finding of high extents of inconsistencies in each of the observed mole ratio related mistakes, and their general reasonability, supports the view that most of the participants’ knowledge regarding stoichiometry calculations lay closer to the fragmented end of the coherent-fragmented epistemological continuum. Suggested explanations for the observed mistakes and their inconsistencies include differential cognitive load resulting from differential question complexity, overgeneralisations of useful procedures and deployment of other intuitive heuristics. Pedagogical suggestions are made for addressing these kinds of errors in a manner consistent with a fragmented epistemology as described by the Knowledge in Pieces (KiP) theory, although these are possibly limited to in-service chemistry teacher workshops about Stoichiometry calculations within the developing world.