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

https://hechingerreport.org/kids-chatgpt-worse-on-tests/
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 answer. You’re failing to exercise the muscle needed to solve novel (to you), problems.

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>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 useful skill anymore.

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>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.

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Which video games?
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why is this surprising. all such tools hamper learning. if you want to learn, read books, read and write. don't use a spellchecker for ur language exam. no calculator for calculus. pen and paper. how is this going backwards :(
As cool as AI is, the only thing it’s going to do is increase inequality.

I bet all the wealthy and middle class parents with STEM background will get tutoring for their kids in the “old ways” knowing full well that the people who aren’t reliant on AI and can spot mistakes in output will now have a huge advantage in the workforce.

This can also back fire.

I remember the days when people said programmers who don't use the internet/Google while coding actually learn more than those who do. While that was true initially- Eventually internet was just the norm and all pervasive. People who didn't use just got more unproductive, Same with companies.

Sure grind on whatever you are learning, but don't equate suffering with making progress. After a while do use the tools, you won't be building anything worth while without them.

This is an interesting thought. I learned programming thru a text editor vim. I didn’t have autocomplete and LSPs wouldn’t be invented until 8 years later. I wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to install/setup omnicomplete or snippets. All this meant I had to seek out the docs every time I wanted to use a method (or even be aware of an API), I had to write the same method every time.

I’d like to think this paid off for me, when writing JS I have a good heuristic on what methods do what that was slowly developed over constant repetition.

Now that I’m mentoring others I notice how others work with these modern editor features. It’s certainly faster than how I did it but I do wonder if there is a difference in aptitude.

When I worked at my first large corporation there was a very intelligent dev. I noticed over time he never really looked up answers on stack overflow or random blogs. He always went straight to the docs and the source code itself. I like to think his method of deliberate slowdown has paid off massively, even the way he asks questions was better than the rest of us.

It is hard to know which ways are better for learning and in the end we were all roughly making the same amount but there has to be something more to the usual pedagogy for software engineering.

I do wonder if tools like autocomplete, myriad of internet answers or musings, and now LLMs may be a hindrance for initial learning but it’s always hard to make these arguments because we have the benefit of learned experience whereas the new generation are now using different tools than us yet still arrive at the same conclusions.

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What were the primary reasons that made students who used ChatGPT do poorly on math assessments, even though they had worked correctly through a greater number of practice problems?
They didn’t have to figure out how to solve the problem. Instead of struggling a bit, which is where the learning happens, they would likely go to ChatGPT for the answer. When the answer bot was taken away, they weren’t prepared to think about how to solve the problem and work it out.

I’ve noticed this even using Copilot in VS Code. I rarely use it, but if I start pulling it out, I notice at the first hint of actually thinking about how to do something, my brain seeks to ask Copilot instead. It’s like there is an off switch that gets flicked when there is an easy button available. If I were to figure it out on my own, I’d know what to do next time I run into a problem like that… if I use Copilot, I’ve learned nothing, other than next time I run into this, use Copilot.

It’s a crutch when it comes to learning.

Exactly. I stopped using it entirely, and I noticed that I would write something and then pause, expecting copilot to take over for a while after quitting. It felt like my brain wasn't really engaged.

Its anecdotal, but I feel a lot better after giving it up and I think I can do a lot more when I can fully reason about the problem after poking at it from different angles.

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