Technology

59174 readers

2961 users here now

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

Our Rules

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

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

915

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]

202 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (14 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago (13 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (10 children)

Congrats but there's a reason teachers ban calculators... And it's not always for the pain.

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

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Yes.

load more comments (8 replies)

load more comments (10 replies)