![]() ![]() In August 2022, just before ChatGPT burst onto the national scene, we held a conference at the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University to discuss this vision. We can’t help wondering, though: What if everyone had a technology tool that was just magic enough to fence off the cliff for 1 st grade children who aren’t reached by current school improvement efforts? Who fail early because of inadequate phonics support? So should appeals by people such as writer Natalie Wexler and education professor Susan Neuman for more knowledge-building curricula, starting in pre-K, so that children don’t fall off cliffs of reading failure in later grades because of insufficient vocabulary, knowledge, syntax, and oral-language skills. The recent calls by journalist Emily Hanford and others to improve the quality of the nation’s training for teachers on phonics should be heeded as a key component in preventing 1 st grade reading failure. No serious reading researcher advocates a “magic bullet” in teaching children everything they need to know about phonics, let alone all the critical reading skills. How much better, he pointed out, to build a fence that prevented any children from falling in the first place. Renowned education researcher Robert Slavin likened this failure to letting children fall off a cliff at the edge of a playground and stationing ambulances (in this case, remedial reading programs) at the bottom. This means that AI is also not yet ready to address the very real and debilitating consequences of exiting 1st grade without learning to read and write simple words and sentences. However, it’s clear from ChatGPT’s errors that AI is not yet ready to tutor early readers. And we agree with entrepreneur and educator Sal Khan, one of the leaders exploring AI tutoring, that we need to “fight like hell for the positive-use cases” of the technology. We are optimistic about artificial intelligence. And ChatGPT suggested that “hamburger” might be a sight word that children should memorize from flashcards. It mentioned calling the child’s attention to the sound of the letter “g” in “night.” It suggested telling the child to think of words with a similar sound to the letter “a” in “name” and then gave as an example the word “apple.” ChatGPT also provided “insect” as an example of a word that has a sound similar to the letter “i” in “bike.” In describing the word “name,” the bot said that the word “does not follow regular phonetic patterns,” apparently unaware of the vowel-consonant-silent-e pattern. ChatGPT had some knowledge of phonics and instructional routines, but it also made egregious errors that no good teacher or tutor would make. So we thought ChatGPT might be good at this task that is so critical to early reading. ![]() We gave ChatGPT a few examples of words that might appear in a book for 1 st graders: “night,” “name,” “bike,” and “hamburger.” There has been no shortage of reports and research on the importance of teaching young children how the letters in a word map onto the sounds in a word-also known as phonics. And then we asked what it would do to help a 1 st grade reader who was stumped by a particular word. ![]() We recently asked ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, to play the role of a world-class reading teacher. But how close are we to this for our earliest readers? And if AI isn’t yet the solution, are we making full use of digital tools that can help? So it’s tempting to hope that tutoring by artificial intelligence could provide a solution. We know that many children are failing to learn to read in our nation’s classrooms. ![]()
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