【推荐1】Whether they know it or not, your students do a lot of critical reading on their own already. For example, many of them could be into young adult fiction. While they’ re reading these books for fun, they are constantly questioning what the author wanted to say with this character or that plot point. They also form unique opinions about the books they read. These are all critical reading activities.

Students can also employ critical reading in their other hobbies. Even if your students are not bookworms—yet——they most certainly like to listen to music. Getting hooked on a song means they’re thinking about the lyrics (歌词) and analyzing them in their heads, even if they’re doing it unconsciously.

To stimulate your students to take up active reading, you should tell them to bring their favorite reading material to class. Whether it’s the young adult fiction or the lyrics to the newest Billie Eilish song, encourage your students to join debates with one another about the subject of the material. That way, you are teaching students critical reading using their respective hobbies. When the activity is over, tell your students they have just done a critical reading exercise. Since they weren’t made to read critically but encouraged to do so through their hobbies , they will engage with the next task much more willingly.

Whether you want your students to start doing a critical reading exercise with a specific piece of classic literature or a novel of their choice, you will probably find a critical analysis on it on YouTube. Why not show it to your students and make them see just how much the community of book lovers has grown in the last couple of years? If they aren’t already a member of that community, the activity will make them feel like they’ re missing out. If they are, it can only heighten their desire to develop some reading skills of their own and be able to express clearly why they loved or otherwise hated the last book they read. When you get your students motivated to learn critical reading skills , plan and carry out activities that will help them do that.

【推荐1】Teachers worried about students turning in essays written by a popular artificial intelligence chatbot now have a new tool of their own.

Edward Tian, a computer science major at Princeton University, has built an App called GPTZero to detect whether a text is written by Chat GPT, which is a popular chatbot that has caused fears over its possibility for immoral uses in American academic circles. His motivation to create the computer program was to fight what he sees as an increase in AI plagiarism (剽窃). Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, there have been reports of students using the language model to pass off AI-written assignments as their own. Many teachers have reached out to him after he released GPTZero, telling him about the positive results they’ve seen from testing it.

To determine whether an essay is written by a computer program, GPTZero uses two indicators: “confusion” and “burstiness (突发性)”. The first indicator measures the complexity of text; if GPTZero is confused by the text, then it has a high complexity and it’s more likely to be human-written. However, if the text is more familiar to GPTZero — because it’s been trained on such data — then it will have low complexity and therefore is more likely to be AI-generated. Besides, the second indicator compares the variations of sentences. Humans tend to write with greater burstiness, for example, with some longer or complex sentences alongside shorter ones. AI sentences tend to be more uniform.

In a demonstration video, Tian compared the App’s analysis of a story in The New Yorker and a Linked In post written by ChatGPT. It successfully distinguished writing between human and AI. However, GPTZero isn’t foolproof, as some users have reported when putting it to the test. He said he’s still working to improve the model’s accuracy.

Tian is not opposed to the use of AI tools like ChatGPT. GPTZero is “not meant to be a tool to stop these technologies from being used,” he said. “But with any new technologies, we need to be able to adopt it responsibly and we need to have protections.”

【推荐2】Searching online for the answer may get you a better grade on the homework. But it won’t necessarily help you learn. Guessing is a better method. Always first find the answers for yourself. It will help you do better on the exam. If you instead find and copy the correct answer, you’ll be less likely to remember it in the future.

For many years, students improved by answering questions and did best on the exam. But by the late 2010s, many students were doing more poorly on the exam than on the homework leading up to it. They would even ace the very first homework. That was the one that tested them on what they had not yet learned. In 2008 , only around 3 out of 20 students did better on their homework than on the exam. But that grew over time. By 2017 , more than half of the students did this way.

What had changed over those years?Students might blame(责怪)themselves.They’d think “I’m not smart enough,”or“I should have studied more.”But something else was going on. One big thing was the rise of smart phones. They appeared in 2008 , but were not common. Now almost everyone carries one. So it would be easier today to quickly go online and find the answer to just about my homework question. But students can’t use phones during an exam. And that might explain why they aren’t doing as well on the tests.

Coming up with answers on your own should lead to better learning for you students at any age. If you find and then copy the right answer, you’re taking the easy way out. And that is wasting a good practice chance .It may take a few more minutes to think of an answer on your own, then check to if it’s right. But that’s the way you’ll learn more.

Now that information is easily available to everyone all the time ,it probably doesn’t make sense for teachers to expect students to take exams without searching online.Instead , teachers should come up with homework and   exam questions that Google can’t easily answer.