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

hechingerreport.org

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

#71

Post by sweeter »

al_borland wrote: post #23
gitroom wrote: post #11

What were the primary reasons that made students who used ChatGPT do poorly on math assessments, even though they had worked correctly through a greater number of practice problems?

They didn’t have to figure out how to solve the problem. Instead of struggling a bit, which is where the learning happens, they would likely go to ChatGPT for the answer. When the answer bot was taken away, they weren’t prepared to think about how to solve the problem and work it out. I’ve noticed this even using Copilot in VS Code. I rarely use it, but if I start pulling it out, I notice at the first hint of actuall…

Exactly. I stopped using it entirely, and I noticed that I would write something and then pause, expecting copilot to take over for a while after quitting. It felt like my brain wasn't really engaged.

Its anecdotal, but I feel a lot better after giving it up and I think I can do a lot more when I can fully reason about the problem after poking at it from different angles.

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

#72

Post by noisy_boy »

golergka wrote: post #28

> 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. Is it me, or is does this direct…

That 127 is when they had access to chatGPT during _practice_.

They fared worse once that access was taken away during the actual exam.

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

#73

Post by khafra »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #5

When I was young, and learning math, my father always forbade me from looking at the answer in the back of the textbook. “You don’t work backwards from the answer!”, and I think this is right. In life, we rarely have the answer in front of us, we have to work that out from the things we know. It’s this struggling that builds a muscle you can then apply to any problem. ChatGPT, I suspect, is akin to looking up the ans…

An LLM used properly would be like an individualized tutor that knows the subject very well, and learns the student's quirks quickly.

I mean, any pre-prompt telling the LLM to be a good tutor and not just give kids the answer can be trivially bypassed by 8 year olds; but if the session logs were available for (potentially LLM-based) review to check whether they stayed in tutor mode...

Shit, I should wrap a UI around this and sell it.

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

#74

Post by preciousoo »

notatoad wrote: post #65
lll-o-lll wrote: post #5

When I was young, and learning math, my father always forbade me from looking at the answer in the back of the textbook. “You don’t work backwards from the answer!”, and I think this is right. In life, we rarely have the answer in front of us, we have to work that out from the things we know. It’s this struggling that builds a muscle you can then apply to any problem. ChatGPT, I suspect, is akin to looking up the ans…

>In life, we rarely have the answer in front of us, this sounds a lot like the "when you're an adult, you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" line we all heard in elementary school. and of course, we all know now how wrong that was. in life, chatGPT exists. and tools like it are only going to become more widespread. we are going to have the answers in front of us. knowing the things an LLM knows is not a u…

This is about building [math] skill, not simply calculating a result

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

#75

Post by horizon10 »

dools wrote: post #19
sim7c00 wrote: post #4

why is this surprising. all such tools hamper learning. if you want to learn, read books, read and write. don't use a spellchecker for ur language exam. no calculator for calculus. pen and paper. how is this going backwards :(

I can report that I have learned more about bash scripting in the past couple of years using ChatGPT to write all manner of scripts, than I did in the previous 20 years of copying and pasting things off StackOverflow.

Agreed. I have learned more about AI using chatGPT compared to traditional stuff.

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

#77

Post by wisty »

notatoad wrote: post #65
lll-o-lll wrote: post #5

When I was young, and learning math, my father always forbade me from looking at the answer in the back of the textbook. “You don’t work backwards from the answer!”, and I think this is right. In life, we rarely have the answer in front of us, we have to work that out from the things we know. It’s this struggling that builds a muscle you can then apply to any problem. ChatGPT, I suspect, is akin to looking up the ans…

>In life, we rarely have the answer in front of us, this sounds a lot like the "when you're an adult, you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" line we all heard in elementary school. and of course, we all know now how wrong that was. in life, chatGPT exists. and tools like it are only going to become more widespread. we are going to have the answers in front of us. knowing the things an LLM knows is not a u…

Not true. Current research is that experts are better with a ChatGTP, and beginners worse. An expert knows what to ask, and a beginner juat flails around.

Tools like calculators, ChatGTP, Google, and chainsaws are often force magnifiers for experts, and a danger for beginners.

If you have an idea of what you are trying to do at a deep level then they are great, but beginners don't, they usually just use them as a shortcut to avoid needing any real understanding of the space, and just get "the answer".

Although in some ways youre right. There will need to be changes in the skills we value, just churning out words, or calculating large sums and interating obscure trig functions will lose value.

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

#78

Post by hi_hi »

Story time. I always struggled with math as a kid. School to high school, then didn't touch it much until Uni. Teachers typically couldn't explain things in a way I "got it" in a school setting. I had some success with a private tutor to get me over the line in high school.

Then at Uni I'm doing Computer Graphics, which included advanced (for me) math. I was panicked, and initially struggled until one of my good friends who was also studying the same course, and is VERY good at math, was able to answer my vague "I don't get it" questions, or at least guide me to more specific questions.

I think I'm quite a visual learner, I don't think at that time there was a concept of people learning "differently". Luckily my good friend was also a visual learner, along with also being very good at math. It was like someone was able to see how my brain worked and feed me information in a way it could compile. I became quite good at math after that.

You really need to learn how to learn. Its fascinating, but also horrifying when I now consider all the lives that have been negatively impacted because this wasn't understood, and people were led to believe they couldn't do something which maybe then really wanted to be able to do.

If GenAI can help with that, I'm all in.

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

#79

Post by ashton314 »

notatoad wrote: post #65
lll-o-lll wrote: post #5

When I was young, and learning math, my father always forbade me from looking at the answer in the back of the textbook. “You don’t work backwards from the answer!”, and I think this is right. In life, we rarely have the answer in front of us, we have to work that out from the things we know. It’s this struggling that builds a muscle you can then apply to any problem. ChatGPT, I suspect, is akin to looking up the ans…

>In life, we rarely have the answer in front of us, this sounds a lot like the "when you're an adult, you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" line we all heard in elementary school. and of course, we all know now how wrong that was. in life, chatGPT exists. and tools like it are only going to become more widespread. we are going to have the answers in front of us. knowing the things an LLM knows is not a u…

Mechanical aids—be they abacuses, slide rules, pocket calculators, supercomputers, or large language models—will never replace the need to reason.
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