Associate professor at UM, science of creativity applied to schools, gifted education, J.J. Abrams and Wes Anderson apologist, and theatre/media/soccer girl dad

Joined October 2012
214 Photos and videos
He had me at "de Tocqueville-esque"
The best part of World Cup X is the de Tocqueville-esque posts from foreigners who see 🇺🇸 through appreciative, fun and new eyes Good reminder there’s lots to love about our country.
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Need to give this one a read. From Playtime to Potential: A Meta-Analysis on the Developmental Role ... sciencedirect.com/science/ar…

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Jeb Puryear retweeted
Teaching in the age of LLMs: I failed 4 students, for the first time ever. I also gave more A 's than ever before. In previous years, students realized after the first or second HW that they weren't in Kansas anymore and needed to work hard. No more. Just solve it with LLMs. But then the midterm arrives, and they can answer 0 of 40 questions. Do they reform their ways? Nah, they just decide to "give up" on class, assuming they'll get a B, or a C, or whatever, because they submitted HW and got decent grades on those. And never before have they encountered a professor who will dare fail them. The flip side is that the most "agentic" students now have the world's best tutor at their disposal. They deeply understand the material and aced my (intentionally very difficult) exams. As if we live in "The Diamond Age". Inequality galore. From my vantage point, "the permanent underclass" appears to be about agency, not assets.
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Jeb Puryear retweeted
Are human creativity tests actually good predictors of creativity for large language models? These tests are now widely applied to assess how “creative” large language models are, but their validity as measures of *machine* creativity has never actually been established. Our new paper studies this question in detail: 💡We ran a large-scale study correlating LLM performance on human creativity tests with creative writing, divergent thinking, and scientific ideation benchmarks. Main findings: ✍️ The Divergent Association Test (“name 10 words as different from each other as possible”) is the best predictor of creative writing ability. 💭The Conditional Divergent Association Test (“name 10 words as different from each other as possible, while staying relevant to a given cue word”) is the best predictor of divergent thinking 🚫 However, no single test predicts all three aspects (creative writing, divergent thinking, scientific ideation) well 🚫 Moreover, and contrary to popular belief, none of the tests is a reliable predictor of scientific ideation ability! Solution: We introduce the Divergent Remote Association Test, a novel creativity test that assesses both divergent *and* convergent thinking ability at the same time. ✅ The Divergent Remote Association Test is the first test to achieve significance in both evaluation criteria—validity (𝑟 = 0.57, 𝑝 ≈ 0.008) and specificity (𝑟 |𝑔 = 0.50, 𝑝 ≈ 0.02)—for predicting scientific creativity. ———— Thanks to my co-authors @AlexiGlad, @jonahablack, @hengjinlp, as well as other colleagues who provided helpful feedback on the manuscript: @Roger_Beaty, @BabakHemmatian, @lrvarshney. Paper link: arxiv.org/abs/2605.13450
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Jeb Puryear retweeted
Year 2 of our 1st grade “walk to read” model. 83% of students were at proficient or above EOY Benchmark- link to blog in 🧵 @D99Cicero @IAReading @sstollar6 @ReadingLeagueIL @karenvaites @HKorbey
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Jeb Puryear retweeted
"A teacher shouldn’t have to marry a psychologist in order to learn that Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is wrong." stevestewartwilliams.com/p/i…
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Jeb Puryear retweeted
Is generative AI really as creative as we’ve been told? This talk takes acritical look at the claims surrounding AI creativity, exploring both theoryand research to argue that AI’s creative abilities may be more limited thanexpected. Despite rapid advancements, Gen AI often falls
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Need to put these on working calendar so I come up as busy on meeting requests.
2026 Michigan Tech Soccer Schedule released 📝: michigantechhuskies.com/news… #FollowTheHuskies
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Jeb Puryear retweeted
Students need more than creativity to act on their ideas. They need creative agency. I had a great conversation with Dr. Maciej Karwowski on confidence, identity, and how AI may support creativity through feedback. 🎧 fuelingcreativitypodcast.com… #Education #Creativity
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Jeb Puryear retweeted
A central problem in classroom math instruction is heterogeneity of prior knowledge. Even if every student “did well” in the previous class, they are often missing different pieces of prerequisite knowledge. That makes whole-class readiness much weaker than it appears.
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Jeb Puryear retweeted
Does knowing more make you ask better questions? 🧠 In our new paper, we say yes, but traditional tests don't reward it. ​We find that great question-askers actually score WORSE on multiple-choice exams, but excel at open-ended projects! @yoed_kenett nature.com/articles/s41539-0…
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😅
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Mar 16
dear apple, the iPod needs to come back. not for nostalgia. for the parents who want their kids to love music and audiobooks without a browser, social media, and the whole internet attached to it
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Jeb Puryear retweeted
Still hear this justification re: AI in classrooms: “It’s out there & we can't be left behind.” Friendly challenge: which happens more often? 1. Schools regretted waiting too long to adopt a technology. 2. Schools regretted adopting a technology before they knew how to use it.
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Jeb Puryear retweeted
The Hoosiers are a team with a bunch of grown ass men, a brilliant choir boy quarterback, and a semi-psycho head coach, which is to say they are a blast to watch and I hope they win it all
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Jeb Puryear retweeted
New evidence from over 6,000 college students finds that digital devices are bad for academic performance and even effect peers in negative ways! Mobile app use reduces grades, increases stress, and lowers class attendance, job applications, and wages coming out of school. It also impacts the academic performance of roommates (who were randomly assigned). nber.org/system/files/workin…
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The more time students spend on screens, the less they learn. Ed tech does not belong in schools (until it is thoroughly tested & proven to help). Excerpt from Jared Cooney Horvath's excellent new book, The Digital Delusion, in @TheFP thefp.com/p/we-gave-students…
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