Impact of an Artificial Intelligence Research Frame on the Perceived Credibility of Educational Research Evidence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is attracting a great deal of attention and it is important to investigate the public perceptions of AI and their impact on the perceived credibility of research evidence. In the literature, there is evidence that people overweight research evidence when framed in neuroscience findings. In this paper, we present the findings of the first investigation of the impact of an AI frame on the perceived credibility of educational research evidence. In an experimental study, we allocated 605 participants including educators to one of three conditions in which the same educational research evidence was framed within one of: AI, neuroscience, or educational psychology. The results demonstrate that when educational research evidence is framed within AI research, it is considered as less credible in comparison to when it is framed instead within neuroscience or educational psychology. The effect is still evident when the subjects' familiarity with the framing discipline is controlled for. Furthermore, our results indicate that the general public perceives AI to be: less helpful in assisting us to understand how children learn, lacking in adherence to scientific methods, and to be less prestigious compared to neuroscience and educational psychology. Considering the increased use of AI technologies in Educational settings, we argue that there should be significant attempts to recover the public image of AI being less scientifically robust and less prestigious than educational psychology and neuroscience. We conclude the article suggesting that AI in Education community should attempt to be more actively engaged with key stakeholders of AI and Education to help mitigate such effects

Are Technological Terms Seductive? The Effect of Technological Terms on Persuasion

Most claims in marketing communication take the form of causal claims stating that using a certain product (the cause, e.g., "Fresh Air, the electronic device") produces a certain benefit (the effect, e.g., "purifies the air at home"). Marketers acknowledge (and studies show) that providing an explanation on the mechanism by which the product produces the effect fosters persuasion. Yet, instead of providing the specific mechanism (e.g. "it purifies the air at home by reducing dust parcels in the air"), they often use general technological terms. Thus, instead of explaining, "Fresh-Air purifies the air at home by reducing dust particles in the air," they "explain" that the product purifies the air by "applying a new algorithm." We call explanations that use general technological terms pseudo explanations, because they follow the same structure, but they lack the crucial element that enables persuasion—they are not content specific.Although using pseudo explanations is a common practice in marketing, no studies have examined if they affect persuasion. In two studies, we exposed participants to causal claims for various products in several formats, and asked them to indicate the probability that they would purchase the product if they needed it. Generally, results show persuasion was the same for pseudo explanations as for the claim alone, when both were less persuasive than mechanistic explanations.Consumers are sensitive to the fact that pseudo explanations do not really explain the mechanism. Thus, whereas pseudo explanations do not affect persuasion, mechanistic explanations do

AI, Biometric Analysis, and Emerging Cheating Detection Systems: The Engineering of Academic Integrity?

Abstract: Cheating behaviors have been construed as a continuing and somewhat vexing issue for academic institutions as they increasingly conduct educational processes online and impose metrics on instructional evaluation. Research, development, and implementation initiatives on cheating detection have gained new dimensions in the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) applications; they have also engendered special challenges in terms of their social, ethical, and cultural implications. An assortment of commercial cheating–detection systems have been injected into educational contexts with little input on the part of relevant stakeholders. This paper expands several specific cases of how systems for the detection of cheating have recently been implemented in higher education institutions in the US and UK. It investigates how such vehicles as wearable technologies, eye scanning, and keystroke capturing are being used to collect the data used for anti-cheating initiatives, often involving systems that have not gone through rigorous testing and evaluation for their validity and potential educational impacts. The paper discusses accountability- and policy-related issues concerning the outsourcing of cheating detection in institutional settings in the light of these emerging technological practices as well as student resistance against the systems involved. The cheating-detection practices can place students in a disempowered, asymmetrical position that is often at substantial variance with their cultural backgrounds

AI, Biometric Analysis, and Emerging Cheating Detection Systems: The Engineering of Academic Integrity?

Abstract: Cheating behaviors have been construed as a continuing and somewhat vexing issue for academic institutions as they increasingly conduct educational processes online and impose metrics on instructional evaluation. Research, development, and implementation initiatives on cheating detection have gained new dimensions in the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) applications; they have also engendered special challenges in terms of their social, ethical, and cultural implications. An assortment of commercial cheating–detection systems have been injected into educational contexts with little input on the part of relevant stakeholders. This paper expands several specific cases of how systems for the detection of cheating have recently been implemented in higher education institutions in the US and UK. It investigates how such vehicles as wearable technologies, eye scanning, and keystroke capturing are being used to collect the data used for anti-cheating initiatives, often involving systems that have not gone through rigorous testing and evaluation for their validity and potential educational impacts. The paper discusses accountability- and policy-related issues concerning the outsourcing of cheating detection in institutional settings in the light of these emerging technological practices as well as student resistance against the systems involved. The practices can place students in a disempowered position

Neuro-Oppression: Does Neuroscience Perpetuate Social Marginalization?

Moral theories proposed by Immanuel Kant and Alan Gewirth argue that the ability to reason can demarcate who is granted moral worth. Social groups such as women, non-white peoples, queer and trans people, and essentially those who are not considered mentally or physically ‘normal’ have been marginalized through naturalistic arguments of intellectual inferiority rooted in biology. Michel Foucault argues that oppressive systems form through a genealogical socio-historical process that posits one identity as superior, and the other as inferior. I will use a similar Foucauldian historicist framework to argue that the neurosciences are susceptible to this naturalistic fallacy, and thus can perpetuate the marginalization of people

Intensive Labours, Expansive Visions: Emerging ideals of the ethical subject amidst the rise of cognitive neuroscience

This thesis seeks to trace the escalating shift from mind to brain and resulting changes in understandings of care for the self, emergent in part through growing influence of neuroethics and related calls for ‘neuro-enhancement’ of the ethical subject. This study – propelled largely through a critical discourse analysis of recent disciplinary output and public engagement – is particularly interested in observing the increasing confidence of neuroscience-informed perspectives on humanity, with announcements that we are witnessing a so-called ‘Second Enlightenment’. Such calls for a new ontology of ethics, I argue, amounts to overly ‘expansive’ claims funnelled through increasingly ‘intensive’ gazes. Within the rise of neuroscience more broadly, empirical neuroethics proclaims its epistemic privilege with respect to tracing our moral selfhood, in part through its location of measures of the ethical subject within functionally ascribed activity traced at the neurological level. Once elusive properties of conduct and wellbeing are now sought to be registered in the common currency of this synaptic ledger, exclusively overseen by specialists in this new field of expertise. The thesis then explores the subsequent adoption of this new empirical currency by those practicing a ‘hard’ transhumanism. Advocates of this position urge us to embrace methods of cognitive and moral ‘enhancement,’ lest we find ourselves unfit for the future in a world of ever-escalating risk. However, I argue that dominant framings of care of the self within neuroethics tend to be narrowly construed. I suggest that by failing to recognise the socio-historical contingencies of their claims, neuroethicists risk producing rigid, stultifying, and perhaps even self-defeating constructs of the ideal citizen. The personal ethos advanced by these new technologies of the self creates new forms of personal responsibility, which, consistent with neoliberal ideals of progress, involves a perpetual labour upon one's brain as a mode of accumulation strategy. This threatens to become a cruel labour that ultimately jars with our eventual and inevitable neurodegeneration. In response to this emerging ethos, I attempt to go beyond the constraints of a merely critical discourse to enable a more productive, if cautious, engagement with the claims of the new, applied neuro-disciplines. I consider what kind of differently expansive framing of subjectivity might be better suited to the present, compared with the ‘hyper-cognitive’ subject of certain ‘hard’ neuroscientific and neuroethical discourses. Contributing to the growing interest in the social sciences in the broad movement of ‘neurodiversity’, I turn to fictional accounts of dementia to see what might be learned from these literary sources. I argue that these literary explorations of subjectivity open up novel ways of reconceiving our relation to our neurology, and thus may play an important role in reimagining the self in a manner adequate to the complexity, urgency, and promise of our times. Though grounded primarily within the field of the sociology of science and technology, this thesis also draws extensively on related thought in poststructuralist critical and literary theory, while also maintaining an accessibility acutely attuned to the growing importance of interdisciplinary exchange

Delaying Aging and Extending Life – An Ancient Dream Revisited : Using Body Regimens as a Window to Reflect on Aging, Identity, and the Body

Thesis advisor: John B. WilliamsonThe desire to defy the aging process and to prolong the lifespan has long captured the human imagination. Recognized as one of the most ancient known pieces of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh documents a King’s quest to find immortality. More recent examples include the story of Ponce de Leon’s 16th century search to discover the Fountain of Youth, Sir Francis Bacon’s (1659) assertion that humans are naturally immortal “potens non mori,” and Benjamin Franklin’s desire to be preserved in a vat of madeira until science is capable of life extension. Developments in science and technology, including telomere manipulation, genetic engineering, cloning, nanotechnology, the potential to create new organs from stem cells, and the creation of therapeutic pharmaceuticals that could significantly postpone disease, have served to inspire; aging in the 21st century is no longer regarded by scientists as an inevitable process programmed by evolution (Olshansky et al. 2006). Situated within a detailed historical overview, this qualitative research project explores the experiences of individuals engaged in practices currently implicated in potentially delaying aging and even extending life. Based on information from 44 in-depth interviews, this research explores issues such as lay understandings of the biology of aging, conceptualizations of the inner body, the use of and experience with optimization technologies, and the embodied effects of participation in anti-aging and life-extension body regimens.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2008.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Sociology