341–350 of 409 posts
The kids who used AI and studied for a similar amount of time as the non-AI high performers apparently had similar (slightly higher) performance. The kids who used AI and did poorly used the AI to do the homework for them (this is what the article says). I believe AI is basically an amplifier of bad and good. I’m cynical about the world and assume it will be used more for bad than good, but I don’t doubt some of the…
College stopped being about getting an education a long time ago. It's just a low pass filter for the job market. Students aren't actually interested in learning anything, they have been condition for a long time to jump through the hoops. It would be much better if we actually returned to exam and performance based evaluation of students, and stopped giving everyone As just for trying hard. But parents look at colle…
College stopped being about getting an education a long time ago. It's just a low pass filter for the job market. Students aren't actually interested in learning anything, they have been condition for a long time to jump through the hoops. It would be much better if we actually returned to exam and performance based evaluation of students, and stopped giving everyone As just for trying hard. But parents look at colle…
I meet a lot of noj-college people and let's just say, "just a low pass filter" is still A LOT of value.
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I thought that it was generally accepted by now that homework in the volumes that it is being assigned in the modern day was not found to be beneficial in any significant way in the first place? Maybe once all students start outsourcing it to AI it might finally die like it deserves to. People these days grow up with almost no free time for themselves, it's all school, sports/extracurriculars or homework nonstop. All…
How do you expect students to learn anything when: 1. They don't do any homework. 2. All the in-class time is split between the teacher babysitting and playing social worker to problem students, and lecturing, with little to no opportunity to actually practice what they've learned? I understand that some students don't have home environments that are conductive to doing homework well. I understand that some students…
Art is similar. You can look up skills as necessary to try to make the piece you want. Adult art learners often just start with the type of art they want to make.
In both cases, the finished piece might not be the quality you want, but in neither case are you necessarily doing repetitive stuff to learn (playing scales over and over or sketching the same bits over and over). You can retry a piece or move on - the skills will still carry over.
None of these reflect homework in school. Now, I know I graduated school decades ago, but math homework was repetitive with seemingly no real-world application and absolutely no help if I needed it. I took a math course online some years later and it was much better: Instant feedback if I got the problem wrong and instant help to walk through the problem if I needed it - then a different but similar problem was given for the homework. This was actual practice in ways traditional homework wasn't. Homework in the traditional sense isn't practice - they are all miniature tests that affect your grade.
I didn't have to practice writing - I just did the papers assigned and rushed through them. You can grade papers for other subjects on prose and grammar instead of just doing it for language courses. You don't have to read classics to read better if you just read a variety of things you are interested in. You'll read plenty of boring things for other subjects and get that sort of practice.
With most of this stuff, having actual homework isn't necessary as long as students are given time for practice. Practice is what makes you good at something, not homework, and practice can take many forms.
This feels like the calculator debate all over again. Yes, using a calculator leads to worse outcomes in your learning. But also, yes, everyone always carries a calculator on their person 24/7 these days and you'll never be as fast and as accurate as a calculator. I think it would have been kinda cool if you could have unlocked the privilege of using a calculator in school through good grades in math class. Prove you…
> Yes, using a calculator leads to worse outcomes in your learning. Does it? https://www.jstor.org/stable/749255
If you don't have to solve a problem, your brain does not have that work to do.
Your brain working less means it has less opportunities to train.
The consequence is worse cognitive abilities which is tied to worse learning outcomes.
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From your link:
> Sustained calculator use in Grade 4 appears to hinder the development of basic skills in average students.
It noted the following positive outcome:
> apparently improves the average student's basic skills with paper and pencil, both in working exercises and in problem solving
But this only measured the outcome for solving math. Yes, offloading problems will make it easier to solve problems, at the cost of not training your brain, which leads to worse learning outcomes across all subjects.
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I remember reading about people talking how writing and reading books leads to cognitive decline because people won't need to remember things anymore. Pretty sure the way social media is designed contributes more to short attention spans and atrophy of the cerebral cortex.
FYI: The rhetorical fallacy here is called a false syllogism.
Same for social media. The negative effects have been apparent for years.
I don't think we can go back to a world without books, without social media and without AI.
All AI did here is exposed an old problem in education. Kids are expected to get everything perfectly for the first time but a lot of them don't so the class gets easier next year to keep up pass rates. We need to restructure the system to treat failure as a signal instead of a disaster. Grades should come from hard randomized exams with unlimited retakes so one bad day won't hurt you. Homework should be optional mat…
You put way too much faith in kids' desire to learn and their ability to make responsible choices. > Homework should be optional material for self study, evaluated by teachers if you choose to do it but never forced. My wife is a teacher and her school does this. The result is that nobody does homework. The kids who need the extra practice don't get it and they fall into a spiral of failure and apathy. This is especi…
I much prefer the first.
School shouldn't be impossible, but you shouldn't have a charade of schooling.
Obviously, extra practice is a good idea.
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Interesting. Top academic performance is mostly correlated with conscientiousness (willingness to work hard and keeping track of things) and intelligence. And I'd add motivation and interest to that too. I think if you take a physics class where the student is intelligent and intrinsically motivated through their own interest (I admit this is rare) then AI probably helps.
I think if they are intelligent, intrinsically motivated, and willing to pursue knowledge beyond what the class requires , it probably helps. That last part is key. Intrinsic motivation doesn't mean you pursue it outside normal bounds. My kid loves soccer, its her second favorite thing in the world, she has an absurdly high tolerance for physical discomfort while playing, but she doesn't play it at home. There's othe…
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Most domains have some kind of internal consistency/theory building you can do. A smart person can certainly notice inconsistencies when trying to learn something. In fact they're likely to be points of confusion that the smart person will dive into just to try to make sense of things, even if they don't suspect the LLM is at fault.
People who think they are smart often think they can get by in any domain without knowledge and context, but at a certain point this fails and knowledge is required, not just intelligence.
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The fact that exam scores are correlated with how much you study is not the same as exams only reflect how much you study. Two students who study the same amount could have very different exam scores. The reason that there still is a strong correlation between exam score and time of study is because if all other things being equal , students who studies more have higher exam scores.
i'm not saying they reflect how much you study. they reflect a lot of things, including that. but you ask the people who write the tests, they're going to say, how much you know or how much you study, but nonetheless, they are limited. i agree with you. that's part of my point. let's imagine a different study. we instead compare AI-users and non-users on a Wechsler (IQ-adjacent) test. overall, it would be surprising…