Reply #13: Even second and third graders can write "reports". [View All]

[wickerwoman]

They won't have a thesis, but it will encourage the kid to use resources (the internet, encyclopedia, books, magazines, etc.) to say everything they know about elephants, for example. You can't write a computer program that can grade a paper like that.

Like I said, it is possible to encourage critical thinking but I'm being pretty generous when I say about 1% of the current educational products I've seen actually do this and none do them more efficiently than a live teacher could. I used to design these programs and it was a *bitch* trying to do anything more advanced than call and response/flashcarding.

You have the fundamental problem of the computer needing predictable input and students being extremely unpredictable. So you have to design the program to make the students respond predictably. And in doing so, you are excluding certain answers which a teacher would be able to handle and you are forced to use exercise types/prompts which are more in line with testing memorization than in encouraging creativity or critical thinking. Basically, you can teach kids to be critical, but only along pre-programmed lines. You can't account for the full diversity of possible responses.