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.
Congrats but there’s a reason teachers ban calculators… And it’s not always for the pain.
In some cases I’d argue, as an engineer, that having no calculator makes students better at advanced math and problem solving. It forces you to work with the variables and understand how to do the derivation. You learn a lot more manipulating the ideal gas formula as variables and then plugging in numbers at the end, versus adding numbers to start with. You start to implicitly understand the direct and inverse relationships with variables.
Plus, learning to directly use variables is very helpful for coding. And it makes problem solving much more of a focus. I once didn’t have enough time left in an exam to come to a final numerical answer, so I instead wrote out exactly what steps I would take to get the answer – which included doing some graphical solutions on a graphing calculator. I wrote how to use all the results, and I ended up with full credit for the question.
To me, that is the ultimate goal of math and problem solving education. The student should be able to describe how to solve the problem even without the tools to find the exact answer.
Yes.
Use the rod, beat the child!
Take a college physics test without a calculator if you wanna talk about pain. And I doubt you could find a single person who could calculate trig functions or logarithms long hand. At some point you move past the point to prove you can do arithmetic. It’s just not necessary.
The real interesting thing here is whether an LLM is useful as a study aid. It looks like there is more research necessary. But an LLM is not smart. It’s a complicated next word predictor and they have been known to go off the rails for sure. And this article suggests its not as useful and you might think for new learners.
Chem is a long forgotten memory, but trig… It’s a matter of precision to do by hand. Very far from impossible… I’m pretty sure you learn about precision before trig… maybe algebra I or ii. E.g. can you accept pi as 3.14? Or 3.14xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Trig is just rad with pi.
I remember reading somewhere that pi to only 5 digits can calculate the circumference of the earth within an error of about 50cm. Hell NASA only uses like 15 places I think.
Which makes trig calculations by hand easier.
There are many reasons for why some teachers do some things.
We should not forget that one of them is “because they’re useless cunts who have no idea what they’re doing and they’re just powertripping their way through some kids’ education until the next paycheck”.
Not knowing how to add 6 + 8 just because a calculator is always available isn’t okay.
I have friends in my DnD session who have to count the numbers together on their fingers. I feel bad for the person. Don’t blame a teacher for wanting you to be a smarter more efficient and productive person, for banning a calculator.