Does AI actually help students learn? The Hechinger Report examines the results of a recent experiment in a high school which provided 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% more of the practice problems correctly, but they ultimately scored 17% 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% 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 …