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.
I personally use it’s answers as a jumping off point to do my own research, or I ask it for sources directly about things and check those out. I frequently use LLMs for learning about topics, but definitely don’t take anything they say at face value.
For a personal example, I use ChatGPT as my personal Japanese tutor. I use it discuss and break down nuances of various words or sayings, names of certain conjugation forms etc. etc., and it is absolutely not 100% correct, but I can now take the names of things that it gives me in native Japanese that I never would have known and look them up using other resources. Either it’s correct and I find confirming information, or it’s wrong and I can research further independently or ask it follow up questions. It’s certainly not as good as a human native speaker, but for $20 a month and as someone who likes enjoys doing their own research, I fucking love it.
Hey, that’s a cool thing to do! I’ll try it. Learning a new language through LLMs sounds cool.