‘A double-edged sword’: Why some parents have concerns about introducing AI at Primary 4
Assistant Professor Jacqueline Ho, a sociologist of education at Singapore Management University (SMU), pointed to existing research, which has shown how AI can provide customised, on-demand feedback for students.
However, this over-reliance on AI can also impede the development of foundational skills such as reading, writing, and thinking.
“This is particularly concerning for very young students whose neural pathways are still being formed,” she added.
She added, though, that there was not enough research to determine “the conditions under which AI produces these benefits and harms”.
CNA TODAY has reached out to MOE on why Primary 4 was chosen as the age to introduce AI in schools.
WHAT’S REAL VS WHAT ISN’T
In the meantime, parents said that even if students’ over-reliance on the tools is managed, there is still the worry that young children may find it hard to discern between accurate and inaccurate information intuitively.
Ms Valerie Tan, a 36-year-old private tutor, has three children, with her oldest in Primary 3 and her middle child in Primary 2.
She said that her kids found out about AI tools through their friends in school and came home one day asking if they could try “the GPT app that answers everything”.
Since then, she has allowed her children to use generative-AI tools, but not before inserting contextual prompts such as: “You are conversing with an eight-year-old. Use only vocabulary that is suitable at a Primary 3 reading level, and do not generate any output that may be inappropriate for a child.”
Although Ms Tan said that she generally agrees with MOE’s approach to introduce the tools to students, she has reservations about the extent to which students will be able to understand the distinction between “true thinking” and the “predictions” of a large language model (LLM).
“Bearing in mind that the technology is only going to get better, it is now increasingly difficult to discern what’s real and what’s generated,” she added.
