UNIVERSITY of GUYANA

Faculty of Education and Humanities

Department of Language and Cultural Studies

Semester 1, November 2020 – February 2021

TEST ONE

CODE & NAME OF COURSE: ENG 1105 – Introduction to the Use of English
DATE: Saturday, January 9 to Sunday, January 10, 2021
TIME: 48-hour window on Moodle
DURATION of TEST: 2 hours
MAXIMUM SCORE: 25 points
EXAMINERS: Co-ordinator Mark McGowan & Use of English Team
______________________________________________________________________________

INSTRUCTIONS TO STUDENTS: This paper has TWO reading comprehension test passages
which are being circulated 24 hours ahead of the test. Read each passage carefully BEFORE
logging into Moodle over the weekend and taking the 2-hour test.

Passage One

Teacher, the Robots Are Coming. But That’s Not a Bad Thing

By Kevin Bushweller—January 07, 2020

Bring up the idea of even the possibility of artificially intelligent robots replacing some of

what teachers do, and you are likely to spark a tornado of anger among many educators.

Intelligent machines could never match human interactions, they argue. Such moves would be a

giant step toward a digital dystopia in education.

5 That kind of reaction to the role of AI robots in education clearly played out in our recent Big

Ideas survey of K-12 teachers, which featured questions about robotics. The vast majority of

teachers, 84 percent, disagreed with the suggestion that student learning would likely improve if

more K-12 teachers had AI-powered robots working with them as classroom assistants. More

than 90 percent did not think that student learning would improve in classrooms where

10 chronically low-performing human teachers were replaced by artificially intelligent robots.

It makes sense that teachers might think that machines would be even worse than bad human

educators. And just the idea of a human teacher being replaced by a robot is likely too much for
 many of us, and especially educators, to believe at this point.

But consider the case of a computer science professor at Georgia Tech. According to

15 the Global Education & Skills Forum, this professor had a mix of online teaching assistants, and

all of them were human except for one. The teaching assistants were available via email to

answer questions. Only one student in the class thought one of the teaching assistants was not a

human being, because that assistant tended to answer questions much faster than the others. That

student was right.

20 The forum—part of the London-based Varkey Foundation, which brings together leaders

from public, private, and social sectors from around the world to show how improving education

can help solve global problems—posed a provocative question on its site that caught my

attention: “Robots replacing teachers is a good thing—yes or no?”

The better question might have been: Can robots help teachers improve classroom learning?

25 In China, they are testing that question. Hundreds of kindergarten classes in the country are

now using a small robot named KeeKo, which tells stories, poses logic problems, and reacts with

facial expressions when students master content. The robots are part of a big push in the country

to be the world leader in the use of AI-powered technologies.

“Technology is a wonderful tool, and it can help with many individual tasks,” said Darrell

30 Billington, a 25-year veteran social studies teacher at Fairview High School in Boulder, Colo.,

who responded to our national survey of teachers. “But in education, there needs to be some sort

of relationship. I don’t think artificial intelligence is there yet.”

But researchers are trying to get there.

Consider the work of Cynthia Breazeal, an associate professor of Media Arts and Sciences at

35 the MIT Media Lab, who leads the Personal Robots group.

The group is conducting randomized control trials of the use of an AI-powered, teddy bear-

sized and -looking robot named Tega in Boston-area schools that have large English-language-

learner populations. The goal of the robots is to improve the language and literacy skills of 5-

and 6-year-olds. Researchers are tracking gains in the youngsters’ vocabulary and oral language

40 development to determine how the use of human teachers and artificially intelligent robots

together in classrooms compares with instruction without robots.

“We’re starting to see some exciting and significant learning gains,” Breazeal said. “I am

very encouraged.” But she conceded that a longer, bigger study is the next step.
 What is particularly interesting is the research Breazeal and her colleagues are doing

45 around social robots. In their study “Growing Growth Mindset With a Social Robot Peer,” young

children played a puzzle-solving game with a peer-like robot. The social robots were fully

autonomous and programmed to either exhibit a “growth mindset” (modeled after the work of

Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth) or a “neutral” mindset. Breazeal found that children who

played with the growth-mindset robot were more persistent when trying to solve the puzzles

50 compared with the kids working with the neutral robot.

And Breazeal points out that it is not just young children who respond positively to social

robots. The team has used social robots with MIT undergraduates and older adults. “We see a

social-emotional benefit across age groups,” she said.

That social connection also seems to be much stronger with physical robots rather than

55 intelligent tutors or agents students view on computer screens. Jamy Li, an assistant professor in

the Human Media Interaction group at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, conducted a

review of 33 studies that examined how adults and children interact with physical versus virtual

robots. The analysis, published in 2015 in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies,

found that adults and children tend to have more positive interactions with physical robots and

60 find them more believable than virtual robots.

Now, of course, there are all kinds of red flags that go up when you start talking about

artificially intelligent robots playing a bigger role in teaching. Data privacy is a big one, with

huge fears that kids would share personal information with an artificially intelligent robot they

trust, and that information could get in the hands of people who should not see it. Plus, if the

65 information that is input into the robots to allow them to learn is biased or skewed, that would

make the judgments of the robot flawed.

And there is the value of human connections. If students started feeling much more

comfortable interacting with robots rather than human beings, and preferred the machines, they

might jeopardize their willingness and ability to have meaningful conversations or relationships

70 with other people. In some ways, you already see those troubling signs in how many young

people (and even some older folks!) prefer to text back and forth to each other rather than have a

face-to-face conversation.

Breazeal recognizes those downsides. For starters, the AI field right now is not diverse or

inclusive and that could affect the kinds of technologies being developed and fuel potential
 75 biases in the software. And, “we need to be thinking more deeply around ethics,” she said,

“particularly with AI with children.”

But that’s exactly why educators should not be putting their heads in the sand and hoping

they never get replaced by an AI-powered robot. They need to play a big role in the development

of these technologies so that whatever is produced is ethical and unbiased, improves student

80 learning, and helps teachers spend more time inspiring students, building strong relationships

with them, and focusing on the priorities that matter most. If designed with educator input, these

technologies could free up teachers to do what they do best: inspire students to learn and coach

them along the way.

And what the developers of these technologies might need to consider is what matters most is

85 often in the eye of the beholder.

In our survey of teachers, we also asked them to rank duties they think AI robots could

replace to help them do a better job teaching. The top-ranked response (44 percent of teachers)

said “taking attendance, making copies, and other administrative tasks,” 30 percent said

“grading,” and 30 percent said “translating/communicating with emerging bilinguals.”

90 But Billington, the Colorado teacher, takes exception to turning attendance over to robots.

That is often the one time in which he has a face-to-face interaction with some students. “Do

they look happy? Are they sad? What is their mood? I would be sad if I had to give that one up.”

On the other hand, when we spoke, Billington began to calculate aloud the time it takes to

grade essays: “If I take three minutes per student, and there are 120 students, that’s six hours of

95 work. And most assignments take longer than that to grade.”

He paused, adding: “If AI could help us figure out a way to help us grade faster, that would

be amazing.”

As it is, Billington remains heavily skeptical of AI-powered robots becoming a regular

feature in U.S. classrooms in the foreseeable future. But he also cautions educators to never say

100 never. It would be “stupid,” he said, “to think it can’t happen.”

 Passage Two

Herd immunity for COVID-19

By Talha Khan Burki—November 24, 2020

In early October, 2020, three epidemiologists convened in Great Barrington, a small town in

Massachusetts, USA. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University Medical School, Stanford, CA,

USA), Sunetra Gupta (University of Oxford, Oxford, UK) and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard

University, Cambridge, MA, USA) were there to draft an argument for a new strategy to combat

5 COVID-19. They called it the Great Barrington Declaration. It has since been endorsed by

thousands of medical practitioners, researchers, and public health scientists.

“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public

health”, states the declaration. “Keeping the measures in place until a vaccine is available will

cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed...our goal should

10 therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.” The authors

recommended policymakers adopt an approach they termed “focused protection”. This entails

easing restrictions on low-risk groups, with the intention of allowing them to establish immunity

to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) through natural infection,

while simultaneously stepping up the protection of high-risk groups. For example, governments

15 could fund short sabbaticals for vulnerable workers in public-facing jobs and provide

accommodation for individuals who cannot easily maintain isolation in their own home.

Within weeks, an opposing group of experts, also numbering in the thousands, had put their

names to the John Snow Memorandum. The document, named after one of epidemiology's

greatest historical figures, defended the restrictions to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 as

20 “essential to reduce mortality, prevent health-care services from being overwhelmed, and buy

time to set up pandemic response systems to suppress transmission”. It described focused

protection as “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence” and warned that

“uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity and mortality across the

whole population”. The memorandum concluded by asserting that “controlling community

25 spread of COVID-19 is the best way to protect our societies and economies until safe and

effective vaccines and therapeutics arrive within the coming months”.

Massachusetts General Hospital's Rochelle Walensky is one of the original signatories to the

John Snow Memorandum. “The Great Barrington Declaration is predicated on the idea that you
 know who is going to get sick and you can somehow isolate and protect them, but there is

30 absolutely no evidence that we can do this”, she said. She pointed out that the US Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention estimates that up to 40% of Americans have some kind of co-

morbidity that makes them vulnerable to the ravages of COVID-19. Identifying all these people

is not straightforward. “No-one is suggesting that lockdowns should be the default position. They

are a last resort. But if we just let the virus run free without mitigation strategies, such as

35 masking, our hospitals will overflow and that would mean we would no longer be able to take

care of the population's health across the board”, Walensky told The Lancet Respiratory

Medicine.

Kulldorff counters that it is lockdowns that now present the greatest threat to population

health. “We are seeing plummeting vaccination rates, people are not getting diabetes treatment,

40 they are not attending for cancer screening, cardiovascular disease outcomes are worsening, and

the restrictions are putting a huge strain on mental health”, he said. “These are not short-term

problems—closing schools, for example, can have serious consequences that last a lifetime.” The

USA has seen almost 100 000 excess deaths this year from conditions other than COVID-19. “A

large proportion of those excess deaths are due to various aspects of the lockdown”, said

45 Kulldorff. “If you are not in a vulnerable group, the collateral damage of lockdown is far more

destructive than the virus.”

The drafters of the Great Barrington Declaration stress that they are not suggesting people

behave recklessly. Basic precautions, such as handwashing and self-isolation, when necessary,

should be maintained. But the priority is to dismantle many of the constraints that have been

50 imposed all over the world this year. The declaration advocates the resumption of sports and

cultural events and the re-opening of restaurants and other businesses. It advises young, low-risk

adults to discontinue working from home.

Kuldorff and colleagues reckon a focused protection approach would lead to herd immunity

some time between 3 and 6 months, after which the vulnerable could return to normal life.

55 Walensky retorts that the herd immunity point has not been established, nor is it clear how stable

this immunity would be. She noted that the 11 million infections and 250 000 deaths from

COVID-19 that have been documented in the USA only constitute a small fraction of the total

population. “I am not willing to stand behind a policy that leads to 10 or 15 times more deaths”,

said Walensky. She would prefer to wait for herd immunity to be conferred by a vaccine. Most
60 experts believe the earliest this could happen would be the second half of 2021. The debate over

what to do in the interim looks set to continue.