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.
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.