this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
915 points (98.2% liked)

Technology

59123 readers
2290 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I'm not entirely sold on the argument I lay out here, but this is where I would start were I to defend using chatGPT in school as they laid out in their experiment.

It's a tool. Just like a calculator. If a kid learns and does all their homework with a calculator, then suddenly it's taken away for a test, of course they will do poorly. Contrary to what we were warned about as kids though, each of us does carry a calculator around in our pocket at nearly all times.

We're not far off from having an AI assistant with us 24/7 is feasible. Why not teach kids to use the tools they will have in their pocket for the rest of their lives?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think here you also need to teach your kid not to trust unconditionally this tool and to question the quality of the tool. As well as teaching it how to write better prompts, this is the same like with Google, if you put shitty queries you will get subpar results.

And believe me I have seen plenty of tech people asking the most lame prompts.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

As adults we are dubious of the results that AI gives us. We take the answers with a handful of salt and I feel like over the years we have built up a skillset for using search engines for answers and sifting through the results. Kids haven't got years of experience of this and so they may take what is said to be true and not question the results.

As you say, the kids should be taught to use the tool properly, and verify the answers. AI is going to be forced onto us whether we like it or not, people should be empowered to use it and not accept what it puts out as gospel.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

This is true for the whole internet, not only AI Chatbots. Kids need to get teached that there is BS around. In fact kids had to learn that even pre-internet. Every human has to learn that you can not blindly trust anything, that one has to think critically. This is nothing new. AI chatbots just show how flawed human education is these days.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It’s a tool. Just like a calculator.

lol my calculator never "hallucinated".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Yeah it's like if you had a calculator and 10% of the time it gave you the wrong answer. Would that be a good tool for learning? We should be careful when using these tools and understand their limitations. Gen AI may give you an answer that happens to be correct some of the time (maybe even most of the time!) but they do not have the ability to actually reason. This is why they give back answers that we understand intuitively are incorrect (like putting glue on pizza), but sometimes the mistakes can be less intuitive or subtle which is worse in my opinion.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Ask your calculator what 1-(1-1e-99) is and see if it never halucinates (confidently gives an incorrect answer) still.