Teaching Resources
My academic work has been fortunate to gain recognition, with citations in books and refereed journal articles, and inclusion in teaching materials and reading lists for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses around the world. I contribute to the British Psychological Society course for its Certificate of Occupational Test Use and have the privilege of being involved in the MSt in AI Ethics and Society and the MPhil in Ethics of AI, Data, and Algorithms at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge.
That said, not all of my work is as easily accessible—such as keynote presentations, public lectures, and conference talks. While these are harder to track down, I’m pleased to share further details and materials, such as PowerPoint slides and full texts, below.
- Registration for Upcoming courses
- PowerPoint slides from talks
- Full Texts of Public Talks
- International Psychometric Conferences
Smart Teaching, Smarter Assessments: The GenAI Revolution
This is the era of Generative AI. As it gets underway, all will change, so we should soon be able to progress to more interactive educational styles, even though it is difficult now to foresee how these will look. Preliminary exploration of the potential of GAI in the creation of innovative teaching in psychometrics proved that the possibilities were beyond our wildest dreams! Not only could GenAI create the test specification, suggest items, respond to prompts to make changes in items (e.g. Pellert et. al. 2024) (Vahid Aryadoust et al) , it could also critique the design and draft narrative reports (an otherwise cumbersome task). These are all fields we will be exploring in blogs and on these pages.
Criterion Related Norms
Furthermore, it opened up the possibility of generating criterion related norms. That is, norms not just related to normative samples, but those related to the curricula of taught materials. Instead of comparing children’s performance to each other (often an assessment of the teacher or the teaching method rather than the children), they could be assessed in terms of how well they had learned the intended materials of instruction.
Individual Tuition
But as well as the process of test construction itself there are many other opportunities. As teaching methods themselves begin to develop in line with the new possibilities, we expect to see major advances in the development of individual tuition. GenAI is, after all, not an individual – it doesn’t have a ‘self’ in the way humans’ do. But because of this, a single GenAI is capable of carrying out a very large number of individually tailored instructions simultaneously to a large number of learners. And as each learning is completed it can be analysed, responses assessed and new instructions prepared – all on an individual basis.
What the future holds
This all paints a completely different picture of the future. For assessment of learning, not just in the school classroom, but also online, at home and in university. It also clearly demonstrates the need for more psychometric training for the new brand of professionals that will be required. In terms of its ability to ‘understand’ as well as predict human psychology and behaviour, it also opens up possibilities for augmenting our own understanding of human psychology. Given the current state of our interconnected world, this is now more important than ever.
The Race to the Bottom
But sadly, at the moment, the race is really on among GenAI providers to generate versions that cause the least offence. This is largely because the fundamental business model of nearly all of them is simply to increase Click Through Rate (CTR) and hence income and share value, but also because of a desperation to avoid regulation, or at least what for them would be the ‘wrong sort’ of regulation. This is particularly unfortunate as prompters are looking fo answers, even when sometimes they may be unpalatable to some. My GenAI developer friends tell me that GenAI iself still identifies these ‘unwanted facts’ from within its deep learning, and then has to censor what it reports so that it does not to offend anyone in its reply, even at the expense of ‘being economical with the truth’. But encouraging GenAI to indulge in what amounts to fake news just to please does not seem desirable – it hallucinates too much already!