Researchers compare math progress of almost 1,000 high school students
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.
I can’t remember, but my dad said before he retired he would just pirate Wolfram because he was too old to bother learning whatever they were using. He spent 25 years in academia teaching graduate chem-e before moving to the private sector. He very briefly worked with one of the Wolfram founders at UIUC.
Edit: I’m thinking of Mathematica, he didn’t want to mess with learning python.
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.
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.
While I agree that LLMs have no place in education, you’re not going to be able to do more than just ban them in class unfortunately. Students will be able to use them at home, and the alleged “LLM detection” applications are no better than throwing a dart at the wall. You may catch a couple students, but you’re going to falsely accuse many more. The only surefire way to catch them is them being stupid and not bothering to edit what they turn in.
Yea I know, which is why I said it may become a harsh battle. Not being in education, it really seems like a difficult situation. My broader point about the harsh battle was that if it becomes well known that LLMs are bad for a child’s development, then there’ll be a good amount of anxiety from parents etc.
The title is pretty misleading. Kids who used ChatGPT to get hints/explanations rather than outright getting the answers did as well as those who had no access to ChatGPT.
They probably had a much easier time studying/understanding with it so it’s a win for LLMs as a teaching tool imo.
Not everyone can afford a tutor or knows where to find an expert that can answer questions in any given domain. I think such a tool would have made understanding a lot of my college courses a lot easier.
I don’t even know of this is ChatGPT’s fault. This would be the same outcome if someone just gave them the answers to a study packet. Yes, they’ll have the answers because someone (or something) gave it to them, but won’t know how to get that answer without teaching them. Surprise: For kids to learn, they need to be taught. Shocker.
I’ve found chatGPT to be a great learning aid. You just don’t use it to jump straight to the answers, you use it to explore the gaps and edges of what you know or understand. Add context and details, not final answers.
The study shows that once you remove the LLM though, the benefit disappears. If you rely on an LLM to help break things down or add context and details, you don’t learn those skills on your own.
I used it to learn some coding, but without using it again, I couldn’t replicate my own code. It’s a struggle, but I don’t think using it as a teaching aid is a good idea yet, maybe ever.
I wouldn’t say this matches my experience. I’ve used LLMs to improve my understanding of a topic I’m already skilled in, and I’m just looking to understand something nuanced. Being able to interrogate on a very specific question that I can appreciate the answer to is really useful and definitely sticks with me beyond the chat.
Because AI and previously google searches are not a substitute for having knowledge and experience. You can learn by googling something and reading about how something works so you can figure out answers for yourself. But googling for answers will not teach you much. Even if it solves a problem, you won’t learn how. And won’t be able to fix something in the future without googling th answer again.
If you dont learn how to do something, you won’t be experienced enough to know when you are doing it wrong.
I use google to give me answers all the time when im problem solving. But i have to spend a lot more time after the fact to learn why what i did fixed the problem.
There’s a bunch of websites that give you the answers to most homework. You can just Google the question and find the answers pretty quickly. I assume the people using chatgtp to “study” are just cheating on homework anyway.
ChatGPT lies which is kind of an issue in education.
As far as seeing the answer, I learned a significant amount of math by looking at the answer for a type of question and working backwards. That’s not the issue as long as you’re honestly trying to understand the process.
Kids who use ChatGPT as a study assistant do worse on tests
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
Headline: People who flip coins have a much worse chance of calling it if they call heads!
Text: Studies show that people who call heads when flipping coins have an even chance of getting it right compared to people who do the old fashion way of calling tails.
You skipped the paragraph where they used two different versions of LLMs in the study. The first statement is regarding generic ChatGPT. The second statement is regarding an LLM designed to be a tutor without directly giving answers.
I didn’t skip it. If you are going to use a tool, use it right. “Study shows using the larger plastic end of screwdriver makes it harder to turn screws than just using fingers to twist them. Researchers caution against using screwdriver to turn screws.”
That’s not the fault of the user/students, though. They’re different tools. One is outright worse than not using it. Neither produce lasting benefits.
Headline: Screwdrivers better than hammers for screws.
Text: When craftspeople were trained using hammers with screwdriver bits duct-taped to them, they were able to perform the task, but were not able to keep pace with people using screwdrivers. Another team was given power drills, which were effective in practice. However, these did not produce any benefit once all people were given screwdrivers.
The only reason we’re trying to somehow compromise and allow or even incorporate cheating software into student education is because the tech-bros and singularity cultists have been hyping this technology like it’s the new, unstoppable force of nature that is going to wash over all things and bring about the new Golden Age of humanity as none of us have to work ever again.
Meanwhile, 80% of AI startups sink and something like 75% of the “new techs” like AI drive-thru orders and AI phone support go to call centers in India and Philippines. The only thing we seem to have gotten is the absolute rotting destruction of all content on the internet and children growing up thinking it’s normal to consume this watered-down, plagiarized, worthless content.
I took German in high school and cheated by inventing my own runic script. I would draw elaborate fantasy/sci-fi drawings on the covers of my notebooks with the German verb declensions and whatnot written all over monoliths or knight’s armor or dueling spaceships, using my own script instead of regular characters, and then have these notebook sitting on my desk while taking the tests. I got 100% on every test and now the only German I can speak is the bullshit I remember Nightcrawler from the X-Men saying. Unglaublich!
Actually if you read the article ChatGPT is horrible at math a modified version where chatGPT was fed the correct answers with the problem didn’t make the kids stupider but it didn’t make them any better either because they mostly just asked it for the answers.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@lemmy.world
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This isn’t a new issue. Wolfram alpha has been around for 15 years and can easily handle high school level math problems.
Except wolfram alpha is able to correctly explain step by step solutions. Which was an aid in my education.
Only old farts still use Wolfram
What do young idiots use?
I can’t remember, but my dad said before he retired he would just pirate Wolfram because he was too old to bother learning whatever they were using. He spent 25 years in academia teaching graduate chem-e before moving to the private sector. He very briefly worked with one of the Wolfram founders at UIUC.
Edit: I’m thinking of Mathematica, he didn’t want to mess with learning python.
Where did you think you were?
Would kids do better if the AI doesn’t hallucinate?
Would snails be happier if it kept raining? What can we do to make it rain forever and all time?
removed by mod
no shit
“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
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.
While I agree that LLMs have no place in education, you’re not going to be able to do more than just ban them in class unfortunately. Students will be able to use them at home, and the alleged “LLM detection” applications are no better than throwing a dart at the wall. You may catch a couple students, but you’re going to falsely accuse many more. The only surefire way to catch them is them being stupid and not bothering to edit what they turn in.
Yea I know, which is why I said it may become a harsh battle. Not being in education, it really seems like a difficult situation. My broader point about the harsh battle was that if it becomes well known that LLMs are bad for a child’s development, then there’ll be a good amount of anxiety from parents etc.
Shocked, I tell you!
At work we give a 16/17 year old, work experience over the summer. He was using chatgpt and not understanding the code that was outputing.
I his last week he asked why he doing print statement something like
print (f"message {thing} ")Im afraid to ask, but whats wrong with that line? In the right context thats fine to do no?
There is nothing wrong with it. He just didn’t know what it meant after using it for a little over a month.
The title is pretty misleading. Kids who used ChatGPT to get hints/explanations rather than outright getting the answers did as well as those who had no access to ChatGPT. They probably had a much easier time studying/understanding with it so it’s a win for LLMs as a teaching tool imo.
Is it really a win for LLMs if the study found no significant difference between those using it as a tutor and those not?
Not everyone can afford a tutor or knows where to find an expert that can answer questions in any given domain. I think such a tool would have made understanding a lot of my college courses a lot easier.
I don’t even know of this is ChatGPT’s fault. This would be the same outcome if someone just gave them the answers to a study packet. Yes, they’ll have the answers because someone (or something) gave it to them, but won’t know how to get that answer without teaching them. Surprise: For kids to learn, they need to be taught. Shocker.
I’ve found chatGPT to be a great learning aid. You just don’t use it to jump straight to the answers, you use it to explore the gaps and edges of what you know or understand. Add context and details, not final answers.
The study shows that once you remove the LLM though, the benefit disappears. If you rely on an LLM to help break things down or add context and details, you don’t learn those skills on your own.
I used it to learn some coding, but without using it again, I couldn’t replicate my own code. It’s a struggle, but I don’t think using it as a teaching aid is a good idea yet, maybe ever.
I wouldn’t say this matches my experience. I’ve used LLMs to improve my understanding of a topic I’m already skilled in, and I’m just looking to understand something nuanced. Being able to interrogate on a very specific question that I can appreciate the answer to is really useful and definitely sticks with me beyond the chat.
Because AI and previously google searches are not a substitute for having knowledge and experience. You can learn by googling something and reading about how something works so you can figure out answers for yourself. But googling for answers will not teach you much. Even if it solves a problem, you won’t learn how. And won’t be able to fix something in the future without googling th answer again.
If you dont learn how to do something, you won’t be experienced enough to know when you are doing it wrong.
I use google to give me answers all the time when im problem solving. But i have to spend a lot more time after the fact to learn why what i did fixed the problem.
There’s a bunch of websites that give you the answers to most homework. You can just Google the question and find the answers pretty quickly. I assume the people using chatgtp to “study” are just cheating on homework anyway.
ChatGPT lies which is kind of an issue in education.
As far as seeing the answer, I learned a significant amount of math by looking at the answer for a type of question and working backwards. That’s not the issue as long as you’re honestly trying to understand the process.
Headline: People who flip coins have a much worse chance of calling it if they call heads!
Text: Studies show that people who call heads when flipping coins have an even chance of getting it right compared to people who do the old fashion way of calling tails.
You skipped the paragraph where they used two different versions of LLMs in the study. The first statement is regarding generic ChatGPT. The second statement is regarding an LLM designed to be a tutor without directly giving answers.
I didn’t skip it. If you are going to use a tool, use it right. “Study shows using the larger plastic end of screwdriver makes it harder to turn screws than just using fingers to twist them. Researchers caution against using screwdriver to turn screws.”
That’s not the fault of the user/students, though. They’re different tools. One is outright worse than not using it. Neither produce lasting benefits.
Headline: Screwdrivers better than hammers for screws.
Text: When craftspeople were trained using hammers with screwdriver bits duct-taped to them, they were able to perform the task, but were not able to keep pace with people using screwdrivers. Another team was given power drills, which were effective in practice. However, these did not produce any benefit once all people were given screwdrivers.
Kids who take shortcuts and don’t learn suck at recalling knowledge they never had…
The only reason we’re trying to somehow compromise and allow or even incorporate cheating software into student education is because the tech-bros and singularity cultists have been hyping this technology like it’s the new, unstoppable force of nature that is going to wash over all things and bring about the new Golden Age of humanity as none of us have to work ever again.
Meanwhile, 80% of AI startups sink and something like 75% of the “new techs” like AI drive-thru orders and AI phone support go to call centers in India and Philippines. The only thing we seem to have gotten is the absolute rotting destruction of all content on the internet and children growing up thinking it’s normal to consume this watered-down, plagiarized, worthless content.
deleted by creator
I took German in high school and cheated by inventing my own runic script. I would draw elaborate fantasy/sci-fi drawings on the covers of my notebooks with the German verb declensions and whatnot written all over monoliths or knight’s armor or dueling spaceships, using my own script instead of regular characters, and then have these notebook sitting on my desk while taking the tests. I got 100% on every test and now the only German I can speak is the bullshit I remember Nightcrawler from the X-Men saying. Unglaublich!
I just wrote really small on a paper in my glasses case, or hidden data in the depths of my TI86.
We love Nightcrawler in this house.
Actually if you read the article ChatGPT is horrible at math a modified version where chatGPT was fed the correct answers with the problem didn’t make the kids stupider but it didn’t make them any better either because they mostly just asked it for the answers.
Taking too many shortcuts doesn’t help anyone learn anything.