Day: December 12, 2023

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Every year, university admissions officers read and sort through tens of thousands of essays. It’s a long, arduous process.
Now, some researchers say an artificial intelligence tool may be able to help admissions officers sort through essays and recognize prospective students who might previously have gone unrecognized.
The application is a long way off from actually being used in the admissions process, but the group that includes researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder say it has the ability to pull out key traits of students, such as leadership qualities or the ability to persevere.
The possible use of AI in admissions, however, raises questions about how universities would responsibly use it, especially because college admissions officers have said essays might carry more weight in the wake of the Supreme Court decision eliminating the use of race-based admissions..

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Excerpted from Writing Their Future Selves: Instructional Strategies to Affirm Student Identity, © 2023 by Miriam Plotinsky. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
At its core, active learning relies on a collaborative, student-centered approach. As Vanderbilt University professor Cynthia J. Brame explains, “active learning approaches also often embrace the use of cooperative learning groups, a constructivist-based practice that places particular emphasis on the contribution that social interaction can make.” One would think that students embrace such a model, but an unexpected complication of creating a learning environment around active methods is sometimes a show of student resistance. After years of a more passive experience, many students can be loath to do something different, even if the end result will be more fulfilling. In “Students Think Lectures Are Best, But Research Suggests They’re Wrong..