AI helps students learn when it acts as a tutor

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 50:27

   We have very clear evidence about what happened right now. If you use AI to short circuit doing work, i.e. cheating, but even accidentally cheating yourself by saying, help me explain this problem and the AI answers it for you, you don't learn. But if you use AI as a tutor, you learn. Like we've got enough evidence, like AI tutors, positive impact on education, naked AI use, negative impact on education. Like very straightforward. And again, on the MIT sort of study on brains, like what they found was less brain activity when people were asked to recall essays essentially that they didn't write, which is unsurprising, right? Because you didn't take credit for it. So education is just like lifting weights. It has to be uncomfortable to work.

2. 51:05

   And we don't like discomfort. So we find ways to short circuit it. And one of the ways we short circuit it is by delegating the work to AI. So we're going to see a problem anywhere that anyone has offloaded a thing into AI and de-skilling themselves. You're going to lose that skill, right? Because that's what de-skilling does. Sometimes that's okay. I can't use a slide rule. I don't mourn that at all, right? I can't like my ancestors would have had to start a fire.

3. 51:27

   I don't need to do that. It's great, right? That's de-skilling thanks to technology. No problem at all. In some areas, we still want people to be able to write an essay. We still want people to be able to do math by hand. So we will have to work on doing that in school systems. AI has a role to play as a tutor, but it also can be an undercut what we do. So I don't think it's like, it's not an unspoken, like everybody in education is worried about this.

4. 51:48

   I think the solution is pretty clear, but I also think that, you know, it takes a while to get there. What's the solution? solution is going to be we have some really clear pedagogical principles that we know work in education so those are you know tutoring at the individual one-on-one level that's adapted to you helps you learn we finally have a universal tutor of high quality in AI Doesn't do it by default because it's by default told to be a...

5. 52:13

   It wants to do your homework. It wants to do your homework. So, but you can easily, but you can set it up to be a tutor. And when it is, all the evidence seems to be, you know, in meta-analysis and individual RCTs, whether you look at Stanford or Kenya, you see positive effects. So outside of class, a lot of people here may remember like having to take Khan Academy videos outside of class, that flipped classroom setting.

6. 52:35

   Suddenly it's effective. We have AI tutors outside of class to teach you. Then we know the other principle of learning is active learning. So if we get people to actively do things, they learn more. Active learning means that we have in-class case discussions, in-class exercises, debates and discussions without AI in the room, usually. Sometimes we use AI as a tool. And honestly, we're going to go back to tests and blue books.

7. 52:56

   And that's how you do assessment in classroom setting. Oh, those blue books. I mean, it's going to be what it is, right? Like that's a sad loss from a take-home assignment, but so it is. um it's not that hard a problem to solve is what i'm saying like at least inside schools we have control over what students do we can assess them we just have to get to the place where we're doing that and it's going to be an interesting impact on our body of academic knowledge because we have