Doug Holton
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edtechdev.bsky.social
Doug Holton
@edtechdev.bsky.social
faculty development, educational technology, open source, learning sciences...
Mostly posting on mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@dougholton
Reposted by Doug Holton
This is a cool paper showing that first-gen college students don't realize a lot of unwritten rules that lead to success (the value of internships, student clubs, letters from professors).

But giving them access to an LLM for guidance significantly closes the gap. mgcuna.github.io/website/JMP_...
November 9, 2025 at 2:55 PM
Reposted by Doug Holton
My essay for The Teaching Professor, "How Faculty Fool Themselves about Teaching and Learning" now freely available at ResearchGate
www.researchgate.net/publication/...
(PDF) How Faculty Fool Themselves about Teaching and Learning
PDF | Last month I wrote about how students fool themselves into thinking they have learned concepts when they really haven't. This month I focus on how... | Find, read and cite all the research you n...
www.researchgate.net
November 7, 2025 at 11:57 PM
Reposted by Doug Holton
Student Success | How Academic Setbacks Impede First-Generation Completion

A recent study finds students who are the first in their family to attend college are more likely to drop out after receiving a negative grade. https://bit.ly/4oTFZKd

#EDUSky #AcademicSky #HigherEd
November 7, 2025 at 11:28 PM
Reposted by Doug Holton
Adult learners are reshaping higher education. Learn what the science says about cognitive ageing, effective interventions and how to build age-inclusive classrooms: https://ow.ly/3VBZ50XnbGi #HigherEd #AcademicSky #EduSky
‘Adults bring experience and cognitive strengths to lifelong learning’
The science of adult learning provides a road map for strengths-based, age-inclusive programme design and helps turn classrooms into vibrant hubs of intergenerational learning
ow.ly
November 5, 2025 at 5:20 PM
AI Literacy Across the Curriculum
edtechdev.wordpress.com/2025/11/03/a...
Mastering #AILiteracy or indeed any literacy is not something that can be done in a single lesson or module, but is better distributed throughout students’ education (like Writing Across the Curriculum) #AIEd #EdDev #EdTech
AI Literacy Across the Curriculum
As you have no doubt seen, AI is becoming ubiquitous in our lives and in the technologies we use every day. Generative AI is no longer an experimental tool, but a deployed technology in many of the…
edtechdev.wordpress.com
November 3, 2025 at 10:18 PM
Faculty Development and GenAI Playbook: Evidence-based Best Practices www.everylearnereverywhere.org/resources/fa...
#EdDev #AIEd
October 30, 2025 at 4:30 PM
Reposted by Doug Holton
New post on Humanist! I was excited to read Tricia Bertram Gallant and David Rettinger's “Opposite of Cheating,” and the writing is a pleasure. Yes, plagiarism is rampant, but …
Reviving academic integrity: Part I - Dishonesty as a Design Challenge
When I first saw the announcement that Tricia Bertram Gallant and David A Rettinger were putting out a new book called The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI, I immediately ...
humanist.ghost.io
October 28, 2025 at 2:17 PM
"Increasingly, AI chatbots are unwilling to acknowledge that they do not know the answer to a question. Instead, they make stuff up. A September report from NewsGuard, which monitors online misinformation, found that “non-response rates fell from 31% in August 2024 to 0% in August 2025.”"
An alarming amount of the news information AI chatbots provide to users is false.

The study found that 20% of the AI chatbots’ answers “contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.”
What happens when you trust AI for news
AI chatbots are surging in popularity.
popular.info
October 25, 2025 at 11:15 AM
Reposted by Doug Holton
An AI chatbot’s feedback style can alter your brain activity during learning
An AI chatbot’s feedback style can alter your brain activity during learning
A new study shows the type of feedback a chatbot gives affects learning and brain activity. Reflective feedback boosts problem-solving, while encouraging feedback improves memory.
www.psypost.org
October 9, 2025 at 10:18 PM
Cool demo by @todepond.com of a classroom agent in @tldraw.com
youtu.be/L-fKtZXDb-s?...
Jump to the 10 minute mark to see an example of AI giving guidance to a student working on a math problem on the tldraw digital canvas. Uses the agent starter kit tldraw.dev/starter-kits...
#AIEd #EdTech
tldraw's classroom agent
YouTube video by tldraw
youtu.be
October 10, 2025 at 9:29 AM
Reposted by Doug Holton
Noah D. Finkelstein: A principled way to think about AI in education: guidance for action based on goals, models of human learning, and use of technologies https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01467 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01467 https://arxiv.org/html/2510.01467
October 3, 2025 at 6:30 AM
Reposted by Doug Holton
Notes and system instructions and deep research reports on creating a custom GPT or Gemini Gem to tutor calculus: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p2aeeVmstAASRUsgH52NLDmhghrhhsab2pvmyevnuYI/edit?usp=sharing
Hawkulus: AI Calculus Tutor (Custom GPT) […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
October 2, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by Doug Holton
It should be obvious a priori that it's absurd to judge colleges by the number of applicants they manage to avoid admitting. Quality ≠ selectivity! Now there's evidence demonstrating the absence of an empirical relationship between intellectual engagement and a school's selectivity: is.gd/itHRhu
October 2, 2025 at 11:33 AM
Reposted by Doug Holton
🚨 New preprint 🚨

Across 3 experiments (n = 3,285), we found that interacting with sycophantic (or overly agreeable) AI chatbots entrenched attitudes and led to inflated self-perceptions.

Yet, people preferred sycophantic chatbots and viewed them as unbiased!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thread 🧵
October 1, 2025 at 3:16 PM
Asset-based Approaches to Student Success
edtechdev.wordpress.com/2025/10/01/a...
Strategies for moving from deficit thinking (focusing on what students lack) to asset-based approaches (aka strengths-based approaches).
#EdDev #HigherEd #Teaching #EdReform
Asset-based Approaches to Student Success
In past newsletters and workshops, I’ve shared evidence-based teaching strategies that have been shown to improve student learning, success, engagement, and career readiness: Teaching Tips for the …
edtechdev.wordpress.com
October 1, 2025 at 4:57 PM
Teaching Tips: The First Major Exam or Assignment
edtechdev.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/f...
Some research-based practices you may find useful for before, during, and after your first major assessment to improve student success and help struggling students turn things around afterward.
#EdDev #Teaching
Teaching Tips: The First Major Exam or Assignment
I’ve earlier shared evidence-based teaching tips and resources for the critical first week of a course, including these resources: Establishing Expectations: A Growth Mindset Approach –…
edtechdev.wordpress.com
September 26, 2025 at 1:08 PM
Reposted by Doug Holton
Reposted by Doug Holton
Opinion: Without specific classes, students may leave college still unable to separate science from nonsense, says Natalia Pasternak

#AcademicSky #EduSky
Higher education does not teach critical thinking by default
Without specific classes, students may leave college still unable to separate science from nonsense, says Natalia Pasternak
www.timeshighereducation.com
September 10, 2025 at 9:12 AM
If any LLM devs want to skip ahead of the class, check out How People Learn nap.nationalacademies.org/read/9853/ch... or Teach Students How to Learn youtu.be/yGBfd7LeGMM?...
Another Metacognitive AI strategy: confidence self-assessments arxiv.org/abs/2508.152... #LearningSciences
Teach an LLM to master a body of knowledge? by @jessylin.bsky.social

They propose Active Reading 📙: where for each training doc, they have the model itself propose study strategies, "actively reading" to synthesize its own augmented training corpus.
August 28, 2025 at 8:35 PM
Reposted by Doug Holton
Teaching students how to learn changes more than effort—it changes the pattern of their learning. A brief SRL intervention made study habits more regular & organized all semester, boosting grades. bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky
August 12, 2025 at 4:05 PM
Reposted by Doug Holton
I've been trying to articulate why the fawning, complimentary responses from AI chatbots feel so insidious to me. I've finally figured out how to explain it.

Wrote a long piece on how current model training and design choices threaten our critical thinking skills: maggieappleton.com/ai-enlighten...
A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment
On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions
maggieappleton.com
August 6, 2025 at 9:34 AM
Advancements in astronomy education research: Two decades of progress with undergraduate and adult learners journals.aps.org/prper/abstra...
#Astronomy #PhysicsEd #STEMeducation #DBER #EdDev #ActiveLearning #Teaching
August 7, 2025 at 6:50 AM
Reposted by Doug Holton
A Common Sense Media study found that prominent teacher assistants that use AI generated recommendations that appeared to be rooted in racial stereotypes based on students’ names. About a third of teachers report using AI weekly, according to a recent survey.
Annie and Lakeesha struggle in school. AI teacher assistants treated them very differently.
A Common Sense Media study found that prominent teacher assistants that use AI generated recommendations that appeared to be rooted in racial stereotypes based on students’ names. About a third of teachers report using AI weekly, according to a recent survey.
bit.ly
August 6, 2025 at 2:00 PM