GARC Research Topics

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in schools around the world has garnered significant attention. It offers a host of innovative solutions to enhance teaching and learning experiences, both for students and teachers, and yet presents complex challenges in effective implementation. Students can undertake a wide range of engaging and educational projects using AI in the classroom, such as creating AI-powered chatbots to simulate conversations with characters from literature or historical figures; building predictive models to forecast trends or patterns in real-world data sets; building AI-powered games or simulations that teach computational thinking concepts and problem-solving skills; and experimenting with generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create original artwork or music compositions.

As a community of girls’ schools, one of our key strengths is collaborating in support of our students who are facing increasingly challenging adolescent journeys. Students spend much of their lives at school, and as such teachers play a profoundly important role in their growth and development – not only as students but also as individuals. Action research is a valuable tool for teachers to evaluate new ways of navigating the tension between academic growth and student wellbeing and this year’s GARC topic explores how best to foster healthy girls by highlighting a key indicator of wellbeing – that of student agency.

Girls are known for their social tendencies and collaborative strengths. In fact, analysis from the 2015 PISA testing found that “girls are much better than boys at working together to solve problems”, according to the results of the first OECD PISA assessment of collaborative problem solving. However, in a subsequent OECD exploration of collaborative problem-solving, girls demonstrated lower ‘positive learning feelings’ while engaged in these collaborative projects. If girls feel happier working with others and, according to this OECD (2017) report, are “much better than boys at working together to solve problems” then why the low levels of positive learning feelings?

Driven into quick pivots, experimentation, and navigating familiar approaches in fundamentally new settings during the COVID-19 pandemic, we will soon, with a period of reflection (and recovery) under our belts, consider what we learned about ourselves as educators and our students as learners. What tools and pedagogical approaches, implemented during this global reset in education, resonated in spaces of girl learning? In what ways have educators shifted curriculum, subtly or dramatically, to what we believe girls need to know now? How have the ways in which we evaluate and measure understanding, and mastery of skills and materials changed based on what we learned while teaching girls during the pandemic?

Problem-solving with both understanding and confidence is a vital skill in the toolbox of girls today and the women of tomorrow, yet international studies show girls are more reluctant to engage in problem-solving activities than boys. How do we as educators create environments in our classrooms, clubs, sports teams, and advisory groups for girls to foster a willingness to confidently embrace all aspects of problem-solving: the comfortable and the uncomfortable?

Resilience is built when facing and overcoming challenges. When students believe that intellectual abilities can be developed over time, effective feedback provides the space and vehicle for that growth to happen. With the ongoing concerns around the development of resilience, the willingness to engage with and tackle challenging problems, the focus on the perceived judgmental nature, and perhaps subjective nature, of grades, what effective feedback processes can be implemented to eliminate this cycle and make a move towards reducing the increasing anxiety around achievement amongst our girls today?