Director of Curriculum and Instruction K-12 focused on developing creative and flexible thinking. Whole Child Advocate. Ed. D. @SHUCEHS
Monmouth County, New Jersey
Joined October 2010
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Sean Cronin retweeted
This is a deliberately satirical recipe that nonetheless models a genuinely closed logical loop: the subject, exam, and teaching are mutually defined, success is treated as proof of the method, and failure is deflected onto pupils.
Sean Cronin retweeted
Sold a Story 1 - Sold LETRS w/ no science to support the program's effectiveness
Sold a Story 2 - Selling scripted curriculum to de-professionalize teachers, a field consisting of over 70% women
Both make nasty and false claims about teacher expertise
thebrokencopier.substack.com…
Sean Cronin retweeted
My team and I found 10 important PISA 2025 Reading correlations that policy makers need to take seriously if they want to improve performance. #PISAparody #PISA
Sean Cronin retweeted
“Dead cognition”: thinking that appears to belong to the user but was actually generated by AI, leaving the user with a distorted sense of their own thinking.
“Attribution laundering”: the process by which AI generated ideas or reasoning are subtly presented back to the user as though they came up with them.
arxiv.org/abs/2604.10288
Sean Cronin retweeted
MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students.
A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable.
The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust.
Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates.
The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
Sean Cronin retweeted
I've been running an informal math circle for preschoolers, and it's amazing what 5 yo's can do.
Combinatorial reasoning, backward induction, beginnings of proof... the concepts are there even before mastering arithmetic.
If you have kids 5-7 you can try these games at home too.
Here's what we did our first session 🧵
Sean Cronin retweeted
Endless short-form scrolling triggers a cascade of burnout, stress and depression.
The real cost of “just one more video.”
Sean Cronin retweeted
Norway's youth sports model is super unique:
• No scorekeeping until age 13
• Participation trophies for everyone
• No travel teams or national championships
• No online publishing of scores or athlete rankings
• Parents typically spend less than $1,000 per child per year
The result?
A 93% participation rate — 40 points higher than the U.S. — and more Winter Olympic medals than any other country in history, despite Norway having a population comparable to the Philadelphia metro area (5.6 million).
And it's not just winter sports...
Norway now produces some of the world’s best summer sport athletes, including Erling Haaland (soccer), Casper Ruud (tennis), Viktor Hovland (golf), and Jakob Ingebrigtsen (track and field).
So if you want to learn more about how Norway's youth sports system actually works (and what other countries can learn from it), here's an essay I recently wrote during the Winter Olympics that breaks it all down.
READ: huddleup.substack.com/p/how-…
Sean Cronin retweeted
Which is true. Kids do need knowledge. But the "science" crowd spent years dismissing teachers who said that. Now they're acting like they discovered it.
If the science keeps moving every time it doesn't work, maybe it's not a science. Maybe it's a marketing cycle.
Sean Cronin retweeted
I'm sure there's a role for tech in education (e.g., @khanacademy), but not as 1:1 devices on students' desks.
I hope that many elementary schools will remove devices by Sept., or create an analog path for parents who want that. Let's see if kids do better with books and paper
Sean Cronin retweeted
🚨BREAKING: OpenAI published a paper proving that ChatGPT will always make things up.
Not sometimes. Not until the next update. Always. They proved it with math.
Even with perfect training data and unlimited computing power, AI models will still confidently tell you things that are completely false. This isn't a bug they're working on. It's baked into how these systems work at a fundamental level.
And their own numbers are brutal. OpenAI's o1 reasoning model hallucinates 16% of the time. Their newer o3 model? 33%. Their newest o4-mini? 48%. Nearly half of what their most recent model tells you could be fabricated. The "smarter" models are actually getting worse at telling the truth.
Here's why it can't be fixed. Language models work by predicting the next word based on probability. When they hit something uncertain, they don't pause. They don't flag it. They guess. And they guess with complete confidence, because that's exactly what they were trained to do.
The researchers looked at the 10 biggest AI benchmarks used to measure how good these models are. 9 out of 10 give the same score for saying "I don't know" as for giving a completely wrong answer: zero points. The entire testing system literally punishes honesty and rewards guessing.
So the AI learned the optimal strategy: always guess. Never admit uncertainty. Sound confident even when you're making it up.
OpenAI's proposed fix? Have ChatGPT say "I don't know" when it's unsure. Their own math shows this would mean roughly 30% of your questions get no answer. Imagine asking ChatGPT something three times out of ten and getting "I'm not confident enough to respond." Users would leave overnight. So the fix exists, but it would kill the product.
This isn't just OpenAI's problem. DeepMind and Tsinghua University independently reached the same conclusion. Three of the world's top AI labs, working separately, all agree: this is permanent.
Every time ChatGPT gives you an answer, ask yourself: is this real, or is it just a confident guess?
Sean Cronin retweeted
🧠 MIT recently completed the first brain-scan study on ChatGPT users—and the results are deeply revealing.
Rather than boosting brain function, prolonged AI use may be dulling it.
Over four months of cognitive data suggest we might be measuring productivity all wrong ⤵️
In MIT’s study, participants had their brains scanned while using ChatGPT.
→ 83.3% of users couldn’t recall a single sentence they’d written just minutes earlier.
→ In contrast, those writing without AI had no trouble remembering.
Brain connectivity dropped sharply—from 79 to 42 points.
→ That’s a 47% drop in neural engagement.
→ The lowest cognitive performance among all user groups.
Even after stopping ChatGPT use in later sessions, these users showed continued under-engagement.
→ Their performance remained lower than those who never used AI.
→ This suggests more than dependency—it’s cognitive weakening.
Beyond the scans, educators flagged the writing itself.
→ Essays were technically solid, but often called “robotic,” “soulless,” and “lacking depth.”
Here’s the paradox:
→ ChatGPT makes you 60% faster at completing tasks…
→ But it reduces the mental effort required for learning by 32%.
The top-performing group?
→ Those who began without AI and added it later.
→ They retained the best memory, brain activity, and overall scores.
Using ChatGPT can feel empowering—but it may quietly offload your thinking.
→ You gain speed, but lose engagement.
→ You get answers, but stop learning how to think.
The takeaway isn’t to avoid AI—but to use it intentionally.
→ Use it to assist, not replace your mind.
→ Build cognitive strength—not dependency.
MIT’s early study on AI and the brain lays out the stakes. The way we use these tools matters more than ever.
ALT 🧠 MIT recently completed the first brain-scan study on ChatGPT users—and the results are deeply revealing. Rather than boosting brain function, prolonged AI use may be dulling it. Over four months of cognitive data suggest we might be measuring productivity all wrong ⤵️ In MIT’s study, participants had their brains scanned while using ChatGPT. → 83.3% of users couldn’t recall a single sentence they’d written just minutes earlier. → In contrast, those writing without AI had no trouble remembering. Brain connectivity dropped sharply—from 79 to 42 points. → That’s a 47% drop in neural engagement. → The lowest cognitive performance among all user groups. Even after stopping ChatGPT use in later sessions, these users showed continued under-engagement. → Their performance remained lower than those who never used AI. → This suggests more than dependency—it’s cognitive weakening. Beyond the scans, educators flagged the writing itself.
Sean Cronin retweeted
AI can predict 130 diseases from ONE night of SLEEP.
Artificial intelligence detects breast cancer 5 years before it develops
#MedEd #MedTwitter #SCIENCE #technology #oncology #Cancer #Diagnosis
Sean Cronin retweeted
Circadian rhythm dysfunction is highly prevalent in ADHD
Up to ~75% of patients have delayed sleep and wake timing, and shifting the clock earlier is linked to symptom improvement
I just published a paper on what this means for treatment. Here’s what we found 🧵1/12
ALT https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1697900/full
Sean Cronin retweeted
The most dangerous addiction today isn't a substance.
Research on 100,000 people confirms that heavy short-form video use is just voluntary cognitive decline. We are actively training our brains to fail at hard tasks.
If you can simply sit with a problem for 10 minutes without swiping, you have a massive competitive advantage.
Basically, boredom is the new IQ.
Sean Cronin retweeted
How much of “Mississippi’s education miracle” is an artifact of selection bias?
statmodeling.stat.columbia.e…