How education leaders can get good answers in the age of AI
March 22, 2024, By Kaitlin Hawkes, K-12 Custom Research Manager
As we conduct research into Generative AI here at EAB, we’ve seen significant evidence of its potential operational and instructional power for schools and districts. However, some partners have expressed concern about how the flood of AI-generated content is becoming increasingly harder to distinguish from real, reliable information. This trend is not only impacting students, but also teachers, staff, and community members – and experts believe that this problem is only going to get worse as search engines struggle to filter out AI spam.
This slow but steady deterioration of popular internet platforms, marketplaces, and search engines is a common phenomenon. Typically, online platforms that are initially easy-to-use and valuable to consumers become inundated with ads and other paid content until users grow sick of them and move to new platforms. Known as “enshittification” (yes, that’s the actual term), this phenomenon describes the tidal wave of ads that have taken over many major websites (Facebook and Amazon are two prominent examples). But increasingly, people suspect that Google is already the next victim.
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things easier for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
"Cory Doctorow, author and critic who coined the term “enshittification.”
Indeed, finding real, reliable results on Google Search has become gradually more difficult over the past few years. These observations were recently validated in a study on search-engine optimized (SEO) spam in search engines out of Germany. The study looked at over 7,000 product reviews across three different search engines and found that search engines have “significant problems” with too much ad content pushing out real results. The authors also worry that as generative AI content floods the internet, these benign but annoying advertisements will be outcompeted by pure AI spam and misinformation, making Google even more difficult to use.
So, for schools and districts looking for quick answers to pressing questions using reliable, research-backed sources, what options are left?
Ask EAB!
EAB’s custom research team are experts in navigating this shifting landscape. Our research team has years of experience identifying the most applicable and reliable research for our partners’ most pressing (and obscure) questions. So how can you take advantage of our team’s expertise? Below we provide some example topics we often see from partners and provide advice on how to frame your questions to get the best answers possible from our researchers.
Better Questions Lead to Better Answers.
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Good Questions:
- How can we prevent teacher absences?
- Are student attention spans getting shorter?
- Do you have any research on departmentalization at the elementary level?
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Better Questions:
- We’re seeing a lot of teacher absenteeism – how can we motivate teachers to show up?
- We’ve had teachers come to us concerned about student attention spans, particularly when it comes to reading stamina. Is there any evidence that students really have lost reading stamina in the research?
- My department is thinking about elementary-level departmentalization. What does the research say about departmentalization’s impact on student achievement?
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