PISA data show that students who use AI for specific schoolwork tasks, such as summarising texts, drafting or conducting research, attain lower scores in science than students who do not use AI.
So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers.
Seriously, this should be a major signal to keep screens and AI solutions out of classrooms. That's not solving everything but at least students would be given a few hours window of de-brainroting everyday.
I'm open to accept that AI can have a positive impact on education but people and tools are apparently not ready and for the moment using it is a net negative.
> So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers.
The AI they’re talking about is not EdTech AI-based teaching tools. It’s students who use ChatGPT to handle work for them so they can ignore any teaching parts.
Apples and oranges. Using this study to draw conclusions about AI EdTech would be a mistake
> So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers.
Kid pasting the question into ChatGPT and pasting its answer back is not the same as an AI teacher persona.
In my mind an AI teacher can be like a traditional education package (syllabus, material, questions, keeping track of progression) but way more flexible. I don't see no reason why AI teachers shouldn't give Bloom's 2 sigma effect to kids (and adults) very soon.
> In my mind an AI teacher can be like a traditional education package (syllabus, material, questions, keeping track of progression) but way more flexible. I don't see no reason why AI teachers shouldn't give Bloom's 2 sigma effect to kids (and adults) very soon.
I think it's a double-edged sword.
I think some kids will absolutely use it that way, and it turns out to be revolutionary for them. Kids who couldn't afford a tutor now can have one.
But also, there will be kids that think they will do this, and they don't. Instead, they end up talking the AI into letting them off the hook of learning things for themselves, and society pays for the AI tutor while get nothing in return.
When I look at young people today, that's what I see. Some teenagers seem to have a college degree via self-study, while many others have completely fried their brains, while looking into the same devices for the same amount of time.
As you say, like most of any of our current issues, it's not the act of doing something that is the issue, it's the lack of remuneration for doing that thing. Any region would gain an immense amount of more "smart point metrics" (what I choose to refer these scores as) if students had their own personal tutors that helped them along. But that doesn't fit our "profit or perish" economic models.
It's not just compensation grading is a very time intensive process so even if it were paid it eats up either personal time or time they could use preparing lessons or assisting students.
The "AI use ... To help me learn" graph is really interesting! It may be interpreted as showing moderate selective AI use being beneficial and, perhaps, even mitigating the effect of socioeconomic status, that is democratising the learning of science. However, it may also indicated that groups with low AI use/access are left behind, or at least that over-reliance on AI in learning is detrimental.
The breakdown for AI usage is four categories though, not three. While the first three are negatively correlated with increased usage, the one for using AI "to help me learn" is much more flat when it comes to usage frequency.
I got the opposite experience very recently : tried to OCR a bunch of handwritten emails addresses with chatGPT and I had to make so many corrections that I gave up. Whereas Mistral nailed it on first pass.
I say this is a click bait article. The guy is taking a contrarian view on smartphone use by young people, with weak and very subjective arguments.
> the impetus for the most authoritarian internet regulation in the UK, including the <16s ban, has come from the affluent/wealthy/1% elite on the political right wing
Very strong take with no justification at all. What we observe is that many developped countries with different political orientations are currently taking action against harm caused by social media and more generally by excessive screen time. This is not about political right wing.
>It’s easy to understand why: the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. They never have. And they never did themselves,
Really sounds like a frustrated person that projects his own problems on the rest of the world. And totally not relevant to the debate about the impact of social media on teenagers.
