Experts for years have been sizing up AI’s ability to help modernize standardized assessments, how to measure students’ ability to think critically and communicate, according to an article in Education Week.
AI has the potential to generate test items and score them more efficiently and provide actionable feedback on students’ strengths and weaknesses. Teachers are also using AI to help develop in-classroom assessments and grade them.
But teachers haven’t been enthusiastic about the potential of AI to make testing better. In a 2024 EdWeek Research Center survey, about 36% of teachers, school leaders, and district leaders said AI will make standardized testing worse in five years. About 19% believed the technology might improve assessments.
A smaller percentage of educators surveyed used AI to grade assignments.
AI has its shortfalls. Without proper guardrails, generative AI risks students’ privacy. The technology also sometimes offers inaccurate results, and feedback can be biased.
If educators can strike the balance between using AI to bolster assessments and ensure humans are driving and remain actively involved in the process, AI could be useful in measuring students’ progress, according to experts in a recent webinar hosted by the American Educational Research Association and The 74.
AI is showing promise in expediting the scoring of assessments and helping teachers give feedback to students faster, said Victor Lee, an associate professor of education at Stanford University. It’s important for educators to continue to review the feedback AI generates and take the time to incorporate their own personalized comments and scoring to avoid biases AI has been shown to have, he said.
Districts must ensure that teachers establish a “baseline literacy” on how AI works so there is an understanding of what it can do, how it does it, and possible shortcomings or biases, regardless of what new iterations of the technology comes along, said Daniella McNamara, executive director of the Learning Engineering Institute at Arizona State University.
She encouraged districts to let teachers experiment with AI. “The only way to really keep up is by using the tools with students, helping everyone to have exposure to them.”
Don’t ask AI for answers to specific questions; teachers and students should learn how to ask AI, for example, to explain events from different perspectives, McNamara said.
“In the learning literature, we know that the more ways you learn something and encounter something from different perspectives and different modalities, the better,” she said.
Schools and districts considering AI’s help to assess students’ content knowledge should be intentional about the tools they use, Lee said. Instead of trying to learn “how to use every single tool,” educators should think about, “What tool is appropriate for the task?” he said.
“We don’t want AI to do everything,” Lee said. “When you provide assessment feedback to a student, you’re also saying, ‘I paid attention to what you said, I see where your potential is,’ and I’m communicating that and giving you my time.”
Humans should always be part of the assessment process, making sure that the scores and feedback AI returns line up with established rubrics and checking its results for errors, the panelists said.
“Because the AI doesn’t know information about students contextually, … leaving the AI to make all the decisions is not a good policy,” Lee said.
Teachers should have a clear understanding of a test’s goal before they give an assessment, McNamara added. The goal could be to quiz understanding of a specific topic, gauge understanding of writing concepts, or measure progress in reading comprehension. Different goals might require different approaches to scoring or measuring progress, she said.
When in doubt, educators should use the golden rule, Lee said: “Use AI for things with others that you would want them to use AI on with you.”
Education Week
