{"id":518421,"date":"2026-06-30T15:57:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T15:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/518421\/"},"modified":"2026-06-30T15:57:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T15:57:09","slug":"study-using-ai-chatbots-creates-significant-learning-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/518421\/","title":{"rendered":"Study: Using AI Chatbots Creates Significant Learning Loss"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"chatgpt\"<\/p>\n

DENVER, CO – MAY 2 : From left, Sally Wilson, 15, Reese Myers, 16, and 11th grade students discuss about essay for English class final exam at Thomas Jefferson High School in Denver, Colorado on Thursday, May 2, 2024. (Photo by Hyoung Chang\/The Denver Post)<\/p>\n

Denver Post via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Easy access to AI answer bots is killing learning. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s one of the conclusions in a new and troubling study<\/a> about AI use and education. The paper indicates that AI use by students in assessments is common, reduces learning investment, and significantly erodes actual learning.<\/p>\n

In this study, students who used AI on math assessments faced a massive 25% learning loss since AI emerged. Learning loss is the lack of ability to answer questions correctly when they see them again.<\/p>\n

The paper is titled, \u201cFaster Completion, Less Learning: Generative AI Reduced Study Time on Math Problems and the Knowledge They Build,\u201d from authors Sina Rismanchian, of University of California, Irvine, and four researchers from McGraw Hill, the prominent education publisher and digital learning company. Those four are: Hasan Uzun, Jeffrey Matayoshi, Eric Cosyn, and Eyad Kurd-Misto.<\/p>\n

The team studied student behaviors on a math assessment called ALEKS, \u201ca widely deployed adaptive mathematics learning and assessment platform serving more than four million students annually.\u201d Their observation window covered more than 3.2 million student interactions over more than a decade \u2013 before, and since the arrival of easily accessible AI bots. <\/p>\n

The paper focuses on a measure known as time on task, how long a student spends on a particular question. For this, the research team looked at two types of math questions \u2013 word problems that are pretty easy to drop into an AI answer bot, and questions that are more graphic or image based, making them less vulnerable to low effort AI answering. <\/p>\n

What they found was troubling. <\/p>\n

For years before AI, time on task was steady. It did not vary much at all between the two kinds of math questions. But as soon as easy AI showed up, student behaviors changed. Time on task for the problems susceptible to AI answering has fallen since 2023. ChatGPT launched in November of 2022. Since AI, time spent on the AI-susceptible math problems has dropped 27% among college students. In high school, the drop is 31%. In middle school, time on task has declined 9%. <\/p>\n

That decline is important because time on task is a key learning indicator. It shows how much effort a student is putting into understanding, thinking about, and trying to answer the question, how much thinking, reasoning, and calculating they\u2019re doing. <\/p>\n

Effort matters. Just like hitting the gym, stay longer, work harder, get better results. Before AI, let\u2019s say that students were putting an hour in at this particular math gym, now high schoolers are clocking out after 45 minutes. Middle school students are logging out after 40. <\/p>\n

As a result of less time working, students aren\u2019t learning. <\/p>\n

The report shows that students are now 25% less likely to get these math questions \u2013 the ones AI can punch out easily, the ones that students are spending less time on \u2013 correct. In other words, by using AI instead of doing the work, today\u2019s students now know 25% less math than they would have before AI arrived. <\/p>\n

This loss of ability, the paper says, \u201cis the downstream consequence of the earlier learning phase, during which students appear to have relied on AI assistance to complete AI-susceptible problems without developing the durable understanding those problems were designed to build.\u201d <\/p>\n

Students took AI shortcuts to get answers and did not learn, in other words. <\/p>\n

Rismanchian, of University of California, Irvine, said, \u201cSettle on this fact, that students are using AI to bypass learning. Prior to this, it has not been conclusive. Stanford found that students self-reporting of cheating has been stable, pre and post AI \u2013 the numbers here are tracking \u2013 it\u2019s something real.\u201d <\/p>\n

There are serious issues<\/a> with that study from Stanford on rates of academic cheating after the wide availability of AI. Either way, what this new data shows is, as Rismanchian put it, \u201csomething real.\u201d And probably serious. <\/p>\n

Of further interest to some is that this new research across a decade and millions of data points is that proctoring the assessments \u2013 actually securing tests and being able to see or monitor student behavior during the questions \u2013 works to stop the cheating. It\u2019s no surprise that students are less likely to cheat, to take AI-powered shortcuts, when they know someone may be watching. <\/p>\n

\u201cStudents are behaving very different in proctored and non-proctored settings, in non-proctored settings, divergence [in time on task] is there. Even in high stakes tests, we saw this,\u201d Uzun, one of the McGraw Hill team said.<\/p>\n

Cosyn, also with the McGraw Hill team, said, \u201cThe cost of taking shortcuts is zero thanks to those new tools, but the effect vanishes with proctoring.\u201d He added though that proctoring was, \u201cNot a solution. You can\u2019t do surveillance all the time,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Personally, I am not sure why not. If there\u2019s a problem \u2013 and this new report shows a very clear, very serious problem \u2013 and you know what will fix it, it\u2019s hard to understand intentionally not fixing it. Letting students continue to cheat, shortcut their learning, and endure sustained learning loss does not feel like the best option. <\/p>\n

Returning to the headline, easy access to AI-powered cheating tools during exams is undercutting learning. Maybe that should have been obvious. But in case it wasn\u2019t, it ought to be now. <\/p>\n

What, if anything, we\u2019re prepared to do about it is an entirely different question. One we may not want to nudge off to AI to solve. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DENVER, CO – MAY 2 : From left, Sally Wilson, 15, Reese Myers, 16, and 11th grade students…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518422,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[345,237392,85,46,237390,237391,14527,125],"class_list":["post-518421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-eric-cosyn","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-mcgraw-hill","tag-sina-rismanchian","tag-stanford","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}