We all know technology has its upsides and downsides, and AI is no exception. Whenever I use it, I often have to keep prompting, reword my questions, or most times, take pieces of what it gives me instead of merely copying and pasting. However, there are times where it helps me craft faster or better material. Let’s explore some AI tools and how to use them to help build quality assessments.
⚠️ Warning: Before you use any AI understand that the United States has loose policies on data, most companies aren’t corrupt but to stay safe DO NOT use any of your personal information and student information.
⚠️ Chat GPT is not free from biases and stereotypes so make sure you review its content.
This will be focused on multiple choice assessments. We know not one assessment type fits all. However, being able to write high quality multiple choice questions provide a quick and easy way to gauge your students’ grasp of a subject.
⭐️ 💻 Tech Tip: If you are feeling overwhelmed with everything AI and want more information, check out this website usefulai.com
AI Tools
ChatGPT
Link to ChatGPT | You will have to use your schools or personal email to sign up with ChatGPT. Currently one of the best chatbots out there, It uses a large language model to understand and generate human-like responses, allowing it to provide information, answer questions, and facilitate discussions on a wide range of topics (that definition came straight from Chat GPT).
This tool is helpful to write DOK level 4 questions, assess your questions DOK level or quality. You can put a question that you found online from College Board or Smarter balance and have it write similar questions and you can also see how well the question aligns with your standard.
Below are some examples on how you can use this tool. ▶️ Click on the pictures to enlarge the text.
MagicSchool AI
Link to MagicSchool.AI | An education website that uses OpenAI technologies in specific prompts already created and ready to use. There are some paid features, but the free options are worth taking a look. Once you sign up check out some of my favorite prompts for assessment building!
The site has more than just these prompts so have fun!
AI Strategies
Prompting Techniques
Chatbots tend to lean on being too formal, lengthy, and listy. It takes prompting a couple of times to get the answer of your liking. I will tend to ask the prompt to be less formal, shorten the answer, provide the answer in a 5th grader voice, or have it rewrite but with a different context. Use these prompts below to get started!
- Write a DOK level 4 question on “insert standard or specific skill”
- Do all of these questions asses every part of this “insert specific standard”?
- Write a similar question like “insert question”
Remember you don’t have to keep rewriting your whole question, for example if all of these prompts are with the same standard you can keep asking it questions like “write another question on the standard above” and it will know what standard above your talking about.
Bias Detection
AI can spot biases in questions, like those based on gender or culture, and suggest changes to make questions fairer and more inclusive. You can also ask if any background knowledge would be needed to answer the question above.
Example: You are playing a game of golf where the par is 3. The golfer took 5 strokes to get the ball in the hole. What is the score for this hole? I asked if the above question require background knowledge and this was what Chat GPT said, “Yes, this question requires some basic background knowledge of golf scoring.”
Writing Good Distractors
Multiple choice questions not only help you assess what your students know but also has the capability to reveal misconceptions. This requires creating effective distractors, which can be challenging. Have you considered using AI to assist with this process? Use the prompts below when asking to build multiple choice questions.
- Provide improved distractors for this multiple choice question
- What makes each choice a strong distractor – I really like this because it will break down each distractor and why it’s strong
- Write a distractor to assess the misconception of “insert common misconception”
In Summary
AI can be a powerful tool if you use it to hone your own skill and knowledge. There are very rare cases where I ask it to do something and it works perfectly. Sometimes I will go and prompt more to get the response I was looking for and other times I decide it’s so far off that it would be faster if I go about it on my own. My number 1 way I use AI, halving my recipes and formatting lists ha, oh and it does proofread a lot of my work!
