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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

#31

Post by klodolph »

alberth wrote: post #16

I have wondered if future generations will struggling with critical thinking / problem solving - without the aided technology assistance.

Current and previous generations struggle too. Critical thinking and problem solving skills have always been an absolute bear to teach, and few teachers or school systems have the stomach to teach it.

I’m thinking of science education, for example. It’s not just a matter of teaching kids a bunch of disconnected facts about science like “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” but teaching kids to use the scientific method. To teach the scientific method well, you have to get the kids to design experiments and be comfortable with the prospect of failure. This is, sadly, a very modern approach and requires training the teachers how to do this. Some schools don’t but it’s not something you would have likely gotten much of in the 20th century.

Instead, people are still fighting over dumb shit like which facts are taught in class. “Critical thinking skills” are not on the menu most of the time.

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

#33

Post by cybersquare »

darthrupert wrote: post #15

Did nobody read the article? It says right there that the students who used chatgpt right, as a tutor, did much better than their peers. If your human tutors just give you the answers when you ask for them, how do you think it'll ho?

[flagged]

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

#34

Post by ShadowBlades512 »

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…

I think this is very correct for studying, when I was in undergrad, if I saw the answer, I found it was more effective to skip past it and solve it later. Even more important, once I am done, I should not go look at the answer to confirm if I am right or wrong, I should try and validate the answer by looking at my solution and trying to figure out if my solution is correct or not because there are plenty of ways to "disqualify" an answer, once I learned to do this well, my grades really went up.

However, I don't always agree with the fact that we don't have the answer in front of us in many situations. There are a lot of situations beyond grade school and undergrad where you do have the answer in front of you. Sometimes it's in for form of Numpy or Matlab or Simulink. It might be someone's research publication. Replicating these by working both forwards and backwards from their libraries or results can be much more effective.

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

#35

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

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.

You’re supposed to learn by reading books and doing exercises by yourself (https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/). SO is equivalent to ChatGPT and will teach you nothing deep.

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

#36

Post by cmdpint »

ggm wrote: post #6

I was willing to entertain the idea they could do better. I guess the tests have to be written to leverage the skill. That said, all things being equal kids who write notes by hand out-perform kids who type them. Even touch type them. So maybe the old ways are better in this specific brain-knowledge-competency-understanding forming space?

I never was good at hand written notes, but I always outperformed my classmates on tests. Except for the one geometry class where the teacher gave me detention for not taking enough notes. Maybe I'm an exception.

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

#37

Post by mym1990 »

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…

I think it depends on how the tool is used. If a student is just plugging in the problem and asking for the answer, there is clearly no long term benefit to this. If the student is trying to understand a concept, and uses GPT to bounce ideas around or to ask for alternate ways of thinking about something, it can be very helpful.

How spacing is utilized can be helpful too. Struggle with the problem for 20-30 minutes. Ask for a nudge. Struggle some more. Repeat many times.

Some concepts also just have to be thought about differently to get to the aha moment, especially in math. AI may have an opportunity to present many instances of “think about it this way instead”.

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

#38

Post by tj444 »

The evaluation method is wrong.

It's like when cars first came out, you ask people to drive cars for a month and they get used to cars. Then you ask them to compete in a horse race and see how fast they can go.

We should evaluate how fast they solve a problem, no matter how.

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

#39

Post by goatlover »

makk wrote: post #25

What if the test is irrelevant to the current times? “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.” So, in the real world, where people can use chatgpt in their jobs, the kids that use it will do better than the kids who don’t. Maybe a better test is: can you catch chatgpt when it is wr…

ChatGPT won't be able to help with all situations in the real world though. And there's a chance OpenAI fails and other LLMs become less accessible and more expensive. Future lawsuits and legislation could lead to them becoming cripled. It's a hell of a crutch to teach the next generation to lean on.
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