HA Webinar: History assessment in the age of AI: validity, authenticity, and smarter task design

Description

Historical Association webinar series: Historical thinking in a digital world: how history builds digital and media literacy

Presenters: Ben Walsh and Andrew Beattie

This session tackles the immediate departmental challenge: how generative AI changes homework, extended writing, and ‘independent research.’ The focus is not panic or policing — it’s assessment validity and workload reduction. We’ll examine what AI makes easier to fake, what remains robust, and how to redesign tasks so students must demonstrate thinking that is hard to outsource: process evidence, oral defence, in-class micro-writes, annotated bibliographies, source trails, comparative reasoning.

The AI expert segment will demonstrate how platforms like Olex.AI can provide rapid, detailed feedback on student writing in History (as well as English and RS), reducing teacher marking workload by 60-90 minutes per week while maintaining rigorous, rubric-aligned assessment. The session will cover practical applications including marking essays against exam criteria, providing personalised and class-level feedback, identifying whole-class strengths and weaknesses for targeted lesson planning, and supporting students with additional needs through features like multilingual feedback translation.

Crucially, we will also address developing students’ critical AI literacy: teaching them to understand how AI works, evaluate AI-generated content critically, recognise AI limitations and biases, and use AI tools responsibly. History teachers have a particular role in helping students understand that AI systems are products of human choices and historical contexts, not neutral arbiters of truth. The session concludes with realistic school policy considerations, detection limits, and emerging assessment workflows from educational systems in the UK, US, and East Asia.

To use your corporate recording offer on this webinar please fill in this form: https://forms.office.com/e/fGJGBTtzts