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.
“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
The point of learning isn’t just access to that information later. That basic understanding gets built on all the way up through the end of your education, and is the base to all sorts of real world application.
There’s no overlap at all between people who can’t pass a test without an LLM and people who understand the material.
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We learned that calculators hinder learning. Arithmetic is a core competency you can’t do algebra without, let alone higher math.
I really have no idea why you’re asserting the opposite so confidently. Calculators are not beneficial.
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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
proscribedprescribed for you.err… I’m finding it hard to understand the meaning of the sentence using the dictionary meaning of this word. Did you mean to use some other word?
I’d love to tell you how the hell I got there. My brain exploded I guess. I meant prescribed, in the sense that you’re following the exact script someone laid out before you.
I had a physics class in college where we spent each section working through problems to demonstrate the concepts. You were allowed a page “cheat sheet” to use on the exams, and the exams were pretty much the same problems with the numbers changed. Lots of people got As in that class. Not many learned basic physics.
A lot of people don’t get further than that in math, because they don’t understand the basic building blocks. Plugging numbers into a formula isn’t worthless, and a calculator helps that. But it doesn’t help you once the problem changes a little instead of just the inputs.
That seems like the worst way of making an exam.
In case the cheat sheet were not there, it would at least be testing something (i.e. how many formulae you memorised), albeit useless.
When you let students have a cheat sheet, it is supposed to be obvious that this will be a HOTS (higher order thinking skills) test. Well, maybe for teachers lacking said HOTS, it was not obvious.
Yeah, I’m all for “you don’t have to memorize every formula”, but I would have just provided a generic formula sheet and made people at least get from there to the solutions, even if you did the same basic problems.
It’s hard for me to objectively comment on the difficulty of the material because I’d already had most of the material in high school physics and it was pretty much just basic algebra to get from any of the formulas provided to the solution, but the people following the sheets took the full hour to do the exams that took me 5 minutes without the silly cheat sheet, because they didn’t learn anything in the class.
(Edit: the wild part is that a sizable number of people in the class actually studied, like multiple hours, for that test with the exact same problems we had in class with numbers changed, while also bringing the cheat sheet where they had the full step by step solutions in for the test.)
I mean you’re right, but also, anybody who is an actual mathematician has no idea how to add 6+17, mostly only being concerned with “why” is 6+17, and the answer is something along the lines of bijective function space.
Source: what did I do to deserve this
Bertrand Russell tried to logically confirm that 2 + 2 is 4. You can check it in Principia Mathematica
Fun to see how this thread stemmed from “no shit”.
I didn’t mean it that way, I really just meant the discussion is idiotic
As someone who has taught math to students in a classroom, unless you have at least a basic understanding of HOW the numbers are supposed to work, the tool - a calculator - is useless. While getting the correct answer is important, I was more concerned with HOW you got that answer. Because if you know how you got that answer, then your ability to get the correct answer skyrockets.
Because doing it your way leads to blindly relying on AI and believing those answers are always right. Because it’s just a tool right?
No where did I say a kid shouldn’t learn how to do it. I said it’s a tool, I’m saying it’s a dumb argument/discussion.
If I said, students who only ever used a calculator didn’t do as well on a test where calculators werent allowed, you would say " yeah no shit"
This is just an anti technology, anti new generation separation piece that divides people and will ultimately create a rifts that help us ignore real problems.
The main goal of learning is learning how to learn, or learning how to figure new things out. If “a tool can do it better, so there is no point in not allowing it” was the metric, we would be doing a disservice because no one would understand why things work the way they do, and thus be less equipped to further our knowledge.
This is why I think common core, at least for math, is such a good thing because it teaches you methods that help you intuitively figure out how to get to the answer, rather than some mindless set of steps that gets you to the answer.