Every year, the OECD surveys students around the world for the Programme for International Student Assessment. The 2025 results were just released today. [OECD; OECD, PDF] Around the world, results…
  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    maybe this is the wrong thread to not read the article and just sit there and goon about how the thing with empirically bad outcomes is “just a tool”

  • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
    3·
    11 days ago

    Now for the big question:

    Did AI make these students stupid, or is it just selection bias because the stupid students are more likely to use AI?

    • 18107@aussie.zoneEnglish
      1·
      11 days ago

      I suspect it’s a bit of both.

      We have plenty of evidence that states that practice is an excellent learning tool. We also know that AI removes the need for practising thinking by providing immediate answers for everything.

      We also have evidence of students making the poor decision to cheat instead of learning, so it’s logical to assume the same type of student would turn to AI.

  • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    10 days ago

    Of course there are people trying to find a silver lining to this by conjuring up the hypothetical scenario where a student only uses the AI to aid in learning the material instead of just doing all the work.

    First, any convenience in learning the material just reduces your ability to learn it. The friction involved with learning may seem like an inconvenience to be smoothed away, but it turns out that the friction is how learning happens. It’s called engaging with the material. This has been the case with previous technologies: handwriting is better for retaining memory than typing (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/), although it seems like AI is on an entire new level. (I guess there is some commentary about the sadly common worldview that life is about avoiding inconveniences. I feel like this mindset draws a lot of people to AI.)

    Second, there is a very thin line between “helping” you learn the material and just doing the work for you. The temptation to cut corners is always there, and when you have the Corner Cutting Machine at your disposal, you are kidding yourself if you think you will have perfect discipline. Tools influence behavior.

  • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    10 days ago

    I expect we’re gonna hear more about the cherry-picked data points that aren’t atrocious for AI. Like specifically the “help me learn” usage stat (the only one where some AI users are on par or better), and the even more specific “help me learn” usage with AI/media literacy discussed in class stat.

    There’s probably all kinds of interesting factors involved that had to be ignored because they needed an AI fluff statistic. Like the one fact they mention, that high AI-use and partly non-AI use correllate with curiousity. Kids who want information will use the tools given to them, and those are often LLMs. If your teachers are into AI and discuss it in class, even more so. I expect the “once or twice a year”-users (who bottom out every chart) to include a big bulk of kids that just do not care about education (often coming from unpriviliged households), so they use it to cheat on their assignments and call it a day.

    Pretty undeniable though, that the daily users are always worse than the sometimes users. That’s probably the habitual delegation of thought kicking in. I could accept that a subgroup of the AI users learns on par or sliiiightly better than non-users on average, but they might be building up a reliance on tooling that will serve them worse and worse once they get past well-trodden school problems. In the same vein they’re probably all getting fucked, because noone gives a fuck about good text books & reference materials anymore.