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

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

#81

Post by Loranubi »

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…

Except you still have to validate ChatGPTs answer... Even answer keys in text books are sometimes wrong, teachers are sometimes wrong. ChatGPT is often wrong. You still need to learn the skills.

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

#82

Post by notatoad »

preciousoo wrote: post #74
notatoad wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

sure, but kids education is about building useful skills for life. passing a test is not a useful skill, if the test is useless.

teaching kids problem solving and how to be productive is important. maybe that means knowing how to solve certain mathematical equations, maybe that means knowing how to use tools like ChatGPT. focusing on the math just for the sake of passing tests because that's what we've got good tests for isn't super helpful to anybody.

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

#83

Post by eks391 »

cageface wrote: post #63
eks391 wrote: post #60

If I lived before the tape measure was invented, and rely on carefully placing my metersticks to measure things, I can get really good at measuring without the need for a measuring tape. After all, a measuring tape is just a few flexible metersticks anyways, so if you need to measure something longer than the full length of the tape, you are screwed. If you take the measuring tape away from the person who relied on t…

What if the function they were using the tool for is basic reasoning?

ChatGPT is not the first tool used to replace basic reasoning, and we haven't collapsed yet. I would argue that nearly all tools can be used to remove basic reasoning, depending on if you choose to use it in such a manner.

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

#84

Post by tripletao »

These comments are filled with misunderstandings of the result. There were three groups of kids:

1. Control, with no LLM assistance at any time.

2. "GPT Base", raw ChatGPT as provided by OpenAI.

3. "GPT Tutor", improved by the researchers to provide hints rather than complete answers and to make fewer mistakes on their specific problems.

On study problem sets ("as a study assistant"), kids with access to either GPT did better than control.

When GPT access was subsequently removed from all participants ("on tests"), the kids who studied with "GPT Base" did worse than control. The kids with "GPT Tutor" were statistically indistinguishable from control.

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

#85

Post by whazor »

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…

The same holds for calculators. My university banned graphical calculators from math courses. It is too easy to plug in a formula and see the graph. But for mathematical intuition, they want you know how formulas look like from your memory.

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

#86

Post by i-am-fnord »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #44

Used incorrectly. Yes. LLMs, for me, have been tremendously useful in learning new concepts. I frequently feed it my own notes and ask it to correct any misunderstandings, or to expand on things I don’t understand. I use it like I would an on demand tutor, but I can totally understand how it could be used as a shortcut that wouldn’t be helpful. In the same way, I can hire a tutor that will help me actually learn, or…

> LLMs, for me, have been tremendously useful in learning new concepts.

Are you validating this in a rigorous way like this study, or are you just "feeling" like it's useful for your learning?

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

#87

Post by ddfs123 »

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…

>we all know now how wrong that was.

How wrong was it ? I find myself having to do head math every time I playing video games.

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

#88

Post by wongarsu »

ShadowBlades512 wrote: post #34
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 "…

Half of modern mathematics is basically assuming something is true and then trying to work forwards and backwards to show that it is true. But that requires a lot of rigor. If you hand-wave a single step you are just exercising an advanced version of confirmation bias. Working forwards and sanity checking your result is a lot more forgiving.

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

#89

Post by bamboozled »

llm_trw wrote: post #51
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 there usually isn't an answer.

Even when there is, circumstances change and the answer is wrong or slightly wrong.

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

#90

Post by OccamsMirror »

hi_hi wrote: post #78

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 frie…

How did your friend teach you math visually?
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