Artificial Intelligence, Basic Skills, and Quantitative Literacy

Abstract

The introduction in November 2022 of ChatGPT, a freely available language-based artificial intelligence, has led to concerns among some educators about the feasibility and benefits of teaching basic writing and critical thinking skills to students in the context of easily accessed, AI-based cheating mechanisms. As of now, ChatGPT can write pretty convincing student-level prose, but it is still not very good at answering quantitatively rich questions. Therefore, for the time being, the preceding concerns may not be shared by a large portion of the numeracy education community. However, as Google and WolframAlpha are definitely capable of answering standard and some non-standard quantitative queries, a future generation of artificial intelligence including both types of capabilities is not out of the question. So, the issue is still relevant to the readers of this journal. As we continue to focus on the higher-level skills and habits of mind that make up quantitative literacy (QL) and quantitative reasoning (QR), we should not forget that basic literacy and numeracy are still foundational building blocks. While AI is making advances in these basic realms, our human students seem to be losing ground, as implied by the most recent NAEP scores. Here we encourage our readership to focus on what makes QL/QR so challenging to teach, to human as well as artificial intelligences.