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.
Kids who take shortcuts and don’t learn suck at recalling knowledge they never had…
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.
I just wrote really small on a paper in my glasses case, or hidden data in the depths of my TI86.
We love Nightcrawler in this house.
Actually if you read the article ChatGPT is horrible at math a modified version where chatGPT was fed the correct answers with the problem didn’t make the kids stupider but it didn’t make them any better either because they mostly just asked it for the answers.
Good tl;dr
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.
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.
It’s the other way round: Education makes for less gullible people and for workers that demand more rights more freely and easily - and then those are coming for their yachts…
Imagine all the money spent on war would be invested into education 🫣what a beautiful world we would live in.
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.
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.
The point of assignments is to help study for your test.
To me, “assignment” is more of a project. Not rote practice. Applying knowledge to a bit of a longer term, multi-part project.
The education system is primarily about controlling bodies and minds. So any actual education is counter-productive.
Taking too many shortcuts doesn’t help anyone learn anything.
TLDR: ChatGPT is terrible at math and most students just ask it the answer. Giving students the ability to ask something that doesn’t know math the answer makes them less capable. An enhanced chatBOT which was pre-fed with questions and correct answers didn’t screw up the learning process in the same fashion but also didn’t help them perform any better on the test because again they just asked it to spoon feed them the answer.
references
ChatGPT’s errors also may have been a contributing factor. The chatbot only answered the math problems correctly half of the time. Its arithmetic computations were wrong 8 percent of the time, but the bigger problem was that its step-by-step approach for how to solve a problem was wrong 42 percent of the time.
The tutoring version of ChatGPT was directly fed the correct solutions and these errors were minimized.
The researchers believe the problem is that students are using the chatbot as a “crutch.” When they analyzed the questions that students typed into ChatGPT, students often simply asked for the answer.
Kids using an AI system trained on edgelord Reddit posts aren’t doing well on tests?
Ya don’t say.
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.
There are lots of studies out there, and many of them contradict each other. Having a study with references contribute to the discussion, but it isn’t the absolute truth.
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.
Haven’t seen that in ages. Thanks.
IKR?
Cheaters who cheat rather than learn don’t learn. More on this shocking development at 11.
Using ChatGPT as a study aid is cheating how?
Because a huge part about learning is actually figuring out how to extract/summarise information from imperfect sources to solve related problems.
If you use CHATGPT as a crutch because you’re too lazy to read between the lines and infer meaning from text, then you’re not exercising that particular skill.
I don’t disagree, but thats like saying using a calculator will hurt you in understanding higher order math. It’s a tool, not a crutch. I’ve used it many times to help me understand concepts just out of reach. I don’t trust anything LLMs implicitly but it can and does help me.
Congrats but there’s a reason teachers ban calculators… And it’s not always for the pain.
it’s not always for the pain
Use the rod, beat the child!
In some cases I’d argue, as an engineer, that having no calculator makes students better at advanced math and problem solving. It forces you to work with the variables and understand how to do the derivation. You learn a lot more manipulating the ideal gas formula as variables and then plugging in numbers at the end, versus adding numbers to start with. You start to implicitly understand the direct and inverse relationships with variables.
Plus, learning to directly use variables is very helpful for coding. And it makes problem solving much more of a focus. I once didn’t have enough time left in an exam to come to a final numerical answer, so I instead wrote out exactly what steps I would take to get the answer – which included doing some graphical solutions on a graphing calculator. I wrote how to use all the results, and I ended up with full credit for the question.
To me, that is the ultimate goal of math and problem solving education. The student should be able to describe how to solve the problem even without the tools to find the exact answer.
Yes.
Take a college physics test without a calculator if you wanna talk about pain. And I doubt you could find a single person who could calculate trig functions or logarithms long hand. At some point you move past the point to prove you can do arithmetic. It’s just not necessary.
The real interesting thing here is whether an LLM is useful as a study aid. It looks like there is more research necessary. But an LLM is not smart. It’s a complicated next word predictor and they have been known to go off the rails for sure. And this article suggests its not as useful and you might think for new learners.
Chem is a long forgotten memory, but trig… It’s a matter of precision to do by hand. Very far from impossible… I’m pretty sure you learn about precision before trig… maybe algebra I or ii. E.g. can you accept pi as 3.14? Or 3.14xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Trig is just rad with pi.
There are many reasons for why some teachers do some things.
We should not forget that one of them is “because they’re useless cunts who have no idea what they’re doing and they’re just powertripping their way through some kids’ education until the next paycheck”.
ChatGPT hallucinations inspire me to search for real references. It teaches we cannot blindly trust on things that are said. Teachers will commonly reinforce they are correct.
Yea, this highlights a fundamental tension I think: sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, the point of doing something is the doing itself, not the result.
Tech is hyper focused on removing the “doing” and reproducing the result. Now that it’s trying to put itself into the “thinking” part of human work, this tension is making itself unavoidable.
I think we can all take it as a given that we don’t want to hand total control to machines, simply because of accountability issues. Which means we want a human “in the loop” to ensure things stay sensible. But the ability of that human to keep things sensible requires skills, experience and insight. And all of the focus our education system now has on grades and certificates has lead us astray into thinking that the practice and experience doesn’t mean that much. In a way the labour market and employers are relevant here in their insistence on experience (to the point of absurdity sometimes).
Bottom line is that we humans are doing machines, and we learn through practice and experience, in ways I suspect much closer to building intuitions. Being stuck on a problem, being confused and getting things wrong are all part of this experience. Making it easier to get the right answer is not making education better. LLMs likely have no good role to play in education and I wouldn’t be surprised if banning them outright in what may become a harshly fought battle isn’t too far away.
All that being said, I also think LLMs raise questions about what it is we’re doing with our education and tests and whether the simple response to their existence is to conclude that anything an LLM can easily do well isn’t worth assessing. Of course, as I’ve said above, that’s likely manifestly rubbish … building up an intelligent and capable human likely requires getting them to do things an LLM could easily do. But the question still stands I think about whether we need to also find a way to focus more on the less mechanical parts of human intelligence and education.
LLMs likely have no good role to play in education and I wouldn’t be surprised if banning them outright in what may become a harshly fought battle isn’t too far away.
While I agree that LLMs have no place in education, you’re not going to be able to do more than just ban them in class unfortunately. Students will be able to use them at home, and the alleged “LLM detection” applications are no better than throwing a dart at the wall. You may catch a couple students, but you’re going to falsely accuse many more. The only surefire way to catch them is them being stupid and not bothering to edit what they turn in.
While I get that, AI could be handy for some subjects, where you wont put your future on. However using it extinsively for everything is quite an exaggeration.
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.
I would never go back to doing those little chores to get a grade.
So either you have finished obtaining all the academic certifications that require said chores, or you are going to fail at getting a grade.
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
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.
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.
It’s not about using it. It’s about using it ina helpful and constructive manner. Obviously no one’s going to learn anything if all they do is blatantly asking for an answer and writings.
LLM has been a wonderful tool for me to further understand various topics.
This! Don’t blame the tech, blame the grown ups not able to teach the young how to use tech!
Can I blame the tech for using massive amounts of electricity, making e.g. Ireland use more fossil fuels again?
Well, I guess, I mean the evidence is clear, isn’t it?
If you actually read the article you will see that they tested both allowing the students to ask for answers from the LLM, and then limiting the students to just ask for guidance from the LLM. In the first case the students did significantly worse than their peers that didn’t use the LLM. In the second one they performed the same as students who didn’t use it. So, if the results of this study can be replicated, this shows that LLMs are at best useless for learning and most likely harmful. Most students are not going to limit their use of LLMs for guidance.
You AI shills are just ridiculous, you defend this technology without even bothering to read the points under discussion. Or maybe you read an LLM generated summary? Hahahaha. In any case, do better man.
Like any tool, it depends how you use it. I have been learning a lot of math recently and have been chatting with AI to increase my understanding of the concepts. There are times when the textbook shows some steps that I don’t understand why they’re happening and I’ve questioned AI about it. Sometimes it takes a few tries of asking until you figure out the right question to ask to get the right answer you need, but that process of thinking helps you along the way anyways by crystallizing in your brain what exactly it is that you don’t understand.
I have found it to be a very helpful tool in my educational path. However I am learning things because I want to understand them, not because I have to pass a test and that determination in me to want to understand is a big difference. Just getting hints to help you solve the problem might not really help in the long run, but it you’re actually curious about what you’re learning and focus on getting a deeper understanding of why and how something works rather than just getting the right answer, it can be a very useful tool.
Why are you so confident that the things you are learning from AI are correct? Are you just using it to gather other sources to review by hand or are you trying to have conversations with the AI?
We’ve all seen AI get the correct answer but the show your work part is nonsense, or vice versa. How do you verify what AI outputs to you?
You check it’s work. I used it to calculate efficiency in a factory game and went through and made corrections to inconsistencies I spotted. Always check it’s work.
Exactly. It’s a helpful tool but it needs to be used responsibly. Writing it off completely is as bad a take as blindly accepting everything it spits out.
I mean, why are you confident the work in textbooks is correct? Both have been proven unreliable, though I will admit LLMs are much more so.
The way you verify in this instance is actually going through the work yourself after you’ve been shown sources. They are explicitly not saying they take 1+1=3 as law, but instead asking how that was reached and working off that explanation to see if it makes sense and learn more.
Math is likely the best for this too. You have undeniable truths in math, it’s true, or it’s false. There are no (meaningful) opinions on how addition works other than the correct one.
Of all the students in the world, they pick ones from a “Turkish high school”. Any clear indication why there of all places when conducted by a US university?
The study was done in Turkey, probably because students are for sale and have no rights.
It doesn’t matter though. They could pick any weird, tiny sample and do another meaningless study. It would still get hyped and they would still get funding.
