Does AI actually help students learn? A recent experiment in a high school provides a cautionary tale.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that Turkish high school students who had access to ChatGPT while doing practice math problems did worse on a math test compared with students who didn’t have access to ChatGPT. Those with ChatGPT solved 48 percent more of the practice problems correctly, but they ultimately scored 17 percent worse on a test of the topic that the students were learning.
A third group of students had access to a revised version of ChatGPT that functioned more like a tutor. This chatbot was programmed to provide hints without directly divulging the answer. The students who used it did spectacularly better on the practice problems, solving 127 percent more of them correctly compared with students who did their practice work without any high-tech aids. But on a test afterwards, these AI-tutored students did no better. Students who just did their practice problems the old fashioned way — on their own — matched their test scores.
Traditional instruction gave the same result as a bleeding edge ChatGPT tutorial bot. Imagine what would happen if a tiny fraction of the billions spent to develop this technology went into funding improved traditional instruction.
Better paid teachers, better resources, studies geared at optimizing traditional instruction, etc.
Move fast and break things was always a stupid goal. Turbocharging it with all this money is killing the tried and true options that actually produce results, while straining the power grid and worsening global warming.
Investing in actual education infrastructure won’t get VC techbros their yachts, though.
Traditional instruction gave the same result as a bleeding edge ChatGPT tutorial bot.
Interesting way of looking at it. I disagree with your conclusion about the study, though.
It seems like the AI tool would be helpful for things like assignments rather than tests. I think it’s intellectually dishonest to ignore the gains in some environments because it doesn’t have gains in others.
You’re also comparing a young technology to methods that have been adapted over hundreds of thousands of years. Was the first automobile entirely superior to every horse?
I get that some people just hate AI because it’s AI. For the people interested in nuance, I think this study is interesting. I think other studies will seek to build on it.
The point of assignments is to help study for your test.
Homework is forced study. If you’re just handed the answers, you will do shit on the test.
LLMs/GPT, and other forms of the AI boogeyman, are all just a tool we can use to augment education when it makes sense. Just like the introduction of calculators or the internet, AI isn’t going to be the easy button, nor is it going to steal all teachers’ jobs. These tools need to be studied, trained for, and applied purposely in order to be most effective.
EDIT: Downvoters, I’d appreciate some engagement on why you disagree.
are all just a tool
just a tool
it’s just a tool
a tool is a tool
all are just tools
it’s no more than a tool
it’s just a tool
it’s a tool we can use
one of our many tools
it’s only a tool
these are just tools
a tool for thee, a tool for me
guns don’t kill people, people kill people
the solution is simple:
teach drunk people not to shoot their guns so much
unless they want to
that is the American way
tanks don’t kill people, people kill people
the solution is simple:
teach drunk people not to shoot their tanks so much
the barista who offered them soy milk
wasn’t implying anything about their T levels
that is the American way
Thanks for reminding me that AI is just tools, friend.
My memory is not so good.
I often can’t
remember
Ok, I’m going to reply like you’re being serious. It is a tool and it’s out there and it’s not going anywhere. Do we allow ourselves to imagine how it can be improved to help students or do we ignore it and act like it won’t ever be something students need to learn?
I don’t even know of this is ChatGPT’s fault. This would be the same outcome if someone just gave them the answers to a study packet. Yes, they’ll have the answers because someone (or something) gave it to them, but won’t know how to get that answer without teaching them. Surprise: For kids to learn, they need to be taught. Shocker.
I’ve found chatGPT to be a great learning aid. You just don’t use it to jump straight to the answers, you use it to explore the gaps and edges of what you know or understand. Add context and details, not final answers.
The study shows that once you remove the LLM though, the benefit disappears. If you rely on an LLM to help break things down or add context and details, you don’t learn those skills on your own.
I used it to learn some coding, but without using it again, I couldn’t replicate my own code. It’s a struggle, but I don’t think using it as a teaching aid is a good idea yet, maybe ever.
I wouldn’t say this matches my experience. I’ve used LLMs to improve my understanding of a topic I’m already skilled in, and I’m just looking to understand something nuanced. Being able to interrogate on a very specific question that I can appreciate the answer to is really useful and definitely sticks with me beyond the chat.
Kids who take shortcuts and don’t learn suck at recalling knowledge they never had…
The only reason we’re trying to somehow compromise and allow or even incorporate cheating software into student education is because the tech-bros and singularity cultists have been hyping this technology like it’s the new, unstoppable force of nature that is going to wash over all things and bring about the new Golden Age of humanity as none of us have to work ever again.
Meanwhile, 80% of AI startups sink and something like 75% of the “new techs” like AI drive-thru orders and AI phone support go to call centers in India and Philippines. The only thing we seem to have gotten is the absolute rotting destruction of all content on the internet and children growing up thinking it’s normal to consume this watered-down, plagiarized, worthless content.
I took German in high school and cheated by inventing my own runic script. I would draw elaborate fantasy/sci-fi drawings on the covers of my notebooks with the German verb declensions and whatnot written all over monoliths or knight’s armor or dueling spaceships, using my own script instead of regular characters, and then have these notebook sitting on my desk while taking the tests. I got 100% on every test and now the only German I can speak is the bullshit I remember Nightcrawler from the X-Men saying. Unglaublich!
Meanwhile the teacher was thinking, “interesting tactic you’ve got there, admiring your art in the middle of a test”
God knows what he would have done to me if he’d caught me. He once threw an eraser at my head for speaking German with a Texas accent. In his defense, he grew up in a post-war Yugoslavian concentration camp.
At work we give a 16/17 year old, work experience over the summer. He was using chatgpt and not understanding the code that was outputing.
I his last week he asked why he doing print statement something like
print (f"message {thing} ")
Sounds like operator error because he could have asked chatGPT and gotten the correct answer about python f strings…
Students first need to learn to:
- Break down the line of code, then
- Ask the right questions
The student in question probably didn’t develop the mental faculties required to think, “Hmm… what the ‘f’?”
A similar thingy happened to me having to teach a BTech grad with 2 years of prior exp. At first, I found it hard to believe how someone couldn’t ask such questions from themselves, by themselves. I am repeatedly dumbfounded at how someone manages to be so ignorant of something they are typing and recently realising (after interaction with multiple such people) that this is actually the norm[1].
and that I am the weirdo for trying hard and visualising the C++ abstract machine in my mind ↩︎
No. Printing statements, using console inputs and building little games like tic tac toe and crosswords isn’t the right way to learn Computer Science. It is the way things are currently done, but you learn much more through open source code and trying to build useful things yourself. I would never go back to doing those little chores to get a grade.
It all depends on how and what you ask it, plus an element of randomness. Remember that it’s essentially a massive text predictor. The same question asked in different ways can lead it into predicting text based on different conversations it trained on. There’s a ton of people talking about python, some know it well, others not as well. And the LLM can end up giving some kind of hybrid of multiple other answers.
It doesn’t understand anything, it’s just built a massive network of correlations such that if you type “Python”, it will “want” to “talk” about scripting or snakes (just tried it, it preferred the scripting language, even when I said “snake”, it asked me if I wanted help implementing the snake game in Python 😂).
So it is very possible for it to give accurate responses sometimes and wildly different responses in other times. Like with the African countries that start with “K” question, I’ve seen reasonable responses and meme ones. It’s even said there are none while also acknowledging Kenya in the same response.
Im afraid to ask, but whats wrong with that line? In the right context thats fine to do no?
no shit
“tests designed for use by people who don’t use chatgpt is performed by people who don’t”
This is the same fn calculator argument we had 20 years ago.
A tool is a tool. It will come in handy, but if it will be there in life, then it’s a dumb test
The point of learning isn’t just access to that information later. That basic understanding gets built on all the way up through the end of your education, and is the base to all sorts of real world application.
There’s no overlap at all between people who can’t pass a test without an LLM and people who understand the material.
This is ridiculous. The world doesn’t have to bend the knee to LLMs, they’re supposed to be useful tools to solve problems.
And I don’t see why asking them to help with math problems would be unreasonable.
And even if the formulation of the test was not done the right way, your argument is still invalid. LLMs were being used as an aid. The test wasn’t given to the LLM directly. But students failed to use the tool to their advantage.
This is yet another hint that the grift doesn’t actually serve people.
Another thing these bullshit machines can’t do! The list is getting pretty long.
About the calculator argument… Well, the calculator is still used in class, because it makes sense in certain contexts. But nobody ever sold calculators saying they would teach you math and would be a do-everything machine.
Also actual mathematicians are pretty much universally capable of doing many calculations to reasonable precision in their head, because internalizing the relationships between numbers and various mathematical constructs is necessary to be able to reason about them and use them in more than trivial ways.
Tests for recall aren’t because the specific piece of information is the point. They’re because being able to retrieve the information is essential to integrate it into scenarios where you can utilize it, just like being able to do math without a calculator is needed to actually apply math in ways that aren’t proscribed prescribed for you.
As someone who has taught math to students in a classroom, unless you have at least a basic understanding of HOW the numbers are supposed to work, the tool - a calculator - is useless. While getting the correct answer is important, I was more concerned with HOW you got that answer. Because if you know how you got that answer, then your ability to get the correct answer skyrockets.
Because doing it your way leads to blindly relying on AI and believing those answers are always right. Because it’s just a tool right?
No where did I say a kid shouldn’t learn how to do it. I said it’s a tool, I’m saying it’s a dumb argument/discussion.
If I said, students who only ever used a calculator didn’t do as well on a test where calculators werent allowed, you would say " yeah no shit"
This is just an anti technology, anti new generation separation piece that divides people and will ultimately create a rifts that help us ignore real problems.
The main goal of learning is learning how to learn, or learning how to figure new things out. If “a tool can do it better, so there is no point in not allowing it” was the metric, we would be doing a disservice because no one would understand why things work the way they do, and thus be less equipped to further our knowledge.
This is why I think common core, at least for math, is such a good thing because it teaches you methods that help you intuitively figure out how to get to the answer, rather than some mindless set of steps that gets you to the answer.
