Cheating was already common in schools. One study of eleven years of college courses found that when students did their homework in 2008, it improved test grades for 86 percent of them, but it helped only 45 percent of students in 2017. Why? Because over half of students were looking up homework answers on the internet by 2017, so they never got th

Some were assigned to use AI and some were not. The results were nothing short of astonishing. Participants who used ChatGPT saw a dramatic reduction in their time on tasks, slashing it by a whopping 37 percent. Not only did they save time, but the quality of their work also increased as judged by other humans. These improvements were not limited t

By the mid-1990s, calculators were part of the curriculum and were used to complement other ways of learning math. Some tests allowed them, some did not. A practical consensus was achieved. Math education did not fall apart, though debate and research continues today, a half century after the calculator appeared in classrooms.

To some extent, AI wil

You actually have likely read enough at this point to be a good prompt engineer. Let’s start with the third principle I shared earlier—treat AI like a person and tell it what kind of person it is. LLMs work by predicting the next word, or part of a word, that would come after your prompt, sort of like a sophisticated autocomplete function. Then the

For example, we know that in-class lectures are not the most effective way to teach and that topics need to be interwoven together in order for students to retain what they know. Unhappily for students, however, research shows that both homework and tests are actually remarkably useful learning tools.

And while I am sure that in-class essay writing will come back in style as a stopgap measure, AI does more than help students cheat. Every school or instructor will need to think hard about what AI use is acceptable: Is asking AI to provide a draft of an outline cheating? Requesting help with a sentence that someone is stuck on? Is asking for a lis

It may be that working with AI is itself a form of expertise. It is possible that some people are just really good at it. They can adopt Cyborg practices better than others and have a natural (or learned) gift for working with LLM systems. For them, AI is a huge blessing that changes their place in work and society. Other people may get a small gai

In study after study, the people who get the biggest boost from AI are those with the lowest initial ability—it turns poor performers into good performers. In writing tasks, bad writers become solid. In creativity tests, it boosts the least creative the most. And among law students, the worst legal writers turn into good ones. And in a study of ear

Imagine introducing high-quality AI tutors into the flipped classroom model. These AI-powered systems have the potential to significantly enhance the learning experience for students and make flipped classrooms even more effective. They provide personalized learning, where AI tutors can tailor instruction to each student’s unique needs while contin