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Kids who use ChatGPT as a study assistant do worse on tests

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.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

Vanth ,
@Vanth@reddthat.com avatar

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?

Schal330 ,

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.

filister ,

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.

otp ,

I remember teachers telling us not to trust the calculators. What if we hit the wrong key? Lol

Some things never change.

N0body ,

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.

TallonMetroid ,
@TallonMetroid@lemmy.world avatar

Investing in actual education infrastructure won’t get VC techbros their yachts, though.

elvith ,

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…

otp ,

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.

Ilandar ,

What do the results of the third group suggest? AI doesn’t appear to have hindered their ability to manage by themselves under test conditions, but it did help them significantly with their practice results. You could argue the positive reinforcement an AI tutor can provide during test preparations might help some students with their confidence and pre-exam nerves, which will allow them to perform closer to their best under exam conditions.

glowie ,
@glowie@h4x0r.host avatar

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?

Lemminary ,

If I had access to ChatGPT during my college years and it helped me parse things I didn’t fully understand from the texts or provided much-needed context for what I was studying, I would’ve done much better having integrated my learning. That’s one of the areas where ChatGPT shines. I only got there on my way out. But math problems? Ugh.

ForgotAboutDre ,

When you automate these processes you lose the experience. I wouldn’t be surprised if you couldn’t parse information as well as you can now, if you had access to chat GPT.

It’s had to get better at solving your problems if something else does it for you.

Also the reliability of these systems is poor, and they’re specifically trained to produce output that appears correct. Not actually is correct.

Lemminary ,

I quickly learned how ChatGPT works so I’m aware of its limitations. And since I’m talking about university students, I’m fairly sure those smart cookies can figure it out themselves. The thing is, studying the biological sciences requires you to understand other subjects you haven’t learned yet, and having someone explain how that fits into the overall picture puts you way ahead of the curve because you start integrating knowledge earlier. You only get that from retrospection once you’ve passed all your classes and have a panoramic view of the field, which, in my opinion, is too late for excellent grades. This is why I think having parents with degrees in a related field or personal tutors gives an incredibly unfair advantage to anyone in college. That’s what ChatGPT gives you for free. Your parents and the tutors will also make mistakes, but that doesn’t take away the value which is also true for the AIs.

And regarding the output that appears correct, some tools help mitigate that. I’ve used the Consensus plugin to some degree and think it’s fairly accurate for resolving some questions based on research. What’s more useful is that it’ll cite the paper directly so you can learn more instead of relying on ChatGPT alone. It’s a great tool I wish I had that would’ve saved me so much time to focus on other more important things instead of going down the list of fruitless search results with a million tabs open.

One thing I will agree with you is probably learning how to use Google Scholar and Google Books and pirating books using the library to find the exact information as it appears in the textbooks to answer homework questions which I did meticulously down to the paragraph. But only I did that. Everybody else copied their homework, so at least in my university it was a personal choice how far you wanted to take those skills. So now instead of your peers giving you the answers, it’s ChatGPT. So my question is, are we really losing anything?

Overall I think other skills need honing today, particularly verifying information, together with critical thinking which is always relevant. And the former is only hard because it’s tedious work, honestly.

Veddit ,

I read that comment, and use it similarly, as more a super-dictionary/encyclopedia in the same way I’d watch supplementary YouTube videos to enhance my understanding. Rather than automating the understanding process.

More like having a tutor who you ask all the too-stupid and too-hard questions to, who never gets tired or fed up with you.

catloaf ,

I’m guessing there was a previous connection with some of the study authors.

I skimmed the paper, and I didn’t see it mention language. I’d be more interested to know if they were using ChatGPT in English or Turkish, and how that would affect performance, since I assume the model is trained on significantly more English language data than Turkish.

adespoton ,

GPTs are designed with translation in mind, so I could see it being extremely useful in providing me instruction on a topic in a non-English native language.

But they haven’t been around long enough for the novelty factor to wear off.

It’s like computers in the 1980s… people played Oregon Trail on them, but they didn’t really help much with general education.

Fast forward to today, and computers are the core of many facets of education, allowing students to learn knowledge and skills that they’d otherwise have no access to.

GPTs will eventually go the same way.

Ilandar ,

The names of the authors suggest there could be a cultural link somewhere.

Phoenix3875 ,

The paper only says it’s a collaboration. It’s pretty large scale, so the opportunity might be rare. There’s a chance that (the same or other) researchers will follow up and experiment in more schools.

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