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Kids who use ChatGPT as a study assistant do worse on tests (hechingerreport.org)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

199 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 months ago (16 children)

"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

[+] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (9 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (7 children)

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.