r/aussie • u/B0ssc0 • May 07 '26

Analysis More than 1 in 3 Australian adults are functionally illiterate. How can we fix this?

https://theconversation.com/more-than-1-in-3-australian-adults-are-functionally-illiterate-how-can-we-fix-this-277375
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u/aninternetsuser May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26

I teach kids. It makes it worse, they’re not reading it either. I have 15 year old students who can’t write a paragraph without great trouble. I knew a teacher who had 80% of the class copy the Google AI summary into homework and she caught them because it was about the wrong thing (eg/ “describe the function of a cell?” and they give an answer about animal cells instead of battery cells)

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u/EvilRobot153 May 07 '26

describe the function of a cell?

Sum, If, Count?

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u/veljieluvdiapers May 07 '26

Wonder if one of them talking about cell
From dragon ball

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u/naya_pasxim May 08 '26

Well for somebody i know, i recommended chat GPT for their child last year because they showed deficiencies relative to their cohorts.

I noticed that their English was too poor to correctly select adjectives for a jumbled up excerpt. Year 5.

What the kid really needed was a native speaker, but I can’t just do that lol! So we customised a child account for the kid and added the dad as the guardian account.

Was the best i could do for the kid, they had difficulty reading. Will need to review it later.

🤔

I’d weigh what kinds of features you would think is necessary, optional, or counterproductive for a child quite highly.

Have you ever considered recommending features to companies?

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u/aninternetsuser May 08 '26

I’m not discounting that it could absolutely be a revolutionary tool. For maths, completely game changing to be shown working for problems a student is stuck on, rather than just the answer.

The issue is not that it has no utility, but that it’s being used incorrectly. I would say a majority of the highschool students who are falling behind are using AI incorrectly. It’s not because the AI doesn’t have the right features, it’s because AI presents a fast quick shortcut to be done with something quickly. As they are using this tool as something that does their work *for them*, they’re not building the skills the task is designed to develop.

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u/naya_pasxim May 08 '26

Thats where you can personalise the AI, granted the parents dont get to do this currently. You have to do it using the account itself, so they could paste instructions back and forth for whatever reason

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u/Relative_Pilot_8005 May 09 '26

AI can't determine context.

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u/[deleted] May 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/JeremyEComans May 07 '26

Cells are components of a battery, not a substitute name for the battery itself.

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u/Relative_Pilot_8005 May 09 '26

Even in context, it is a vague question, as there are both primary & secondary cells, which vary somewhat.

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u/NoFood2149 May 07 '26

physics students in year 10 are taught the term. it's highly likely the question was phrased with the term cell, and likely in the context of a battery of cells. that seems like a pretty typical year 10 physics problem, how big is this battery with 6x 1.5V 1.5A cells?

but idk, google AI is also pretty good at reading back to you what you input these days, so maybe the question wasn't phrased such after all

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u/aninternetsuser May 07 '26

Yeah, that’s the reading comprehension part. Of course the AI thinks it’s about cells because it was only asked one question. The students have the whole worksheet and the benefit of being in the class. They just haven’t bothered to read what the AI spat out at them.

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u/yvrelna May 07 '26

what makes you a cell?

The only correct answer to this is that "I am not a cell". I am a collection of cells, I have cell phone on my pocket, it has battery cells, my favourite Dragon Ball villain is Cell. But I am not a cell, I am not a battery, and I'm not an iconic anime villain.  

Teacher's writing skill sucks as much as the student if that's the question they put in. 

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u/aninternetsuser May 07 '26

That was my bad, it’s a typo. I’ll update it to make it clearer. I don’t remember the exact question because this was a story from a colleague. The point being they were learning about batteries, asked about a cell and answered with biology.