Comment by bheadmaster 2 days ago
This is actually a great way to foster the learning spirit in the age of AI. Even if the student uses AI to arrive at an answer, they will still need to, at the very least, ask the AI to give it an explanation that will teach them how it arrived to the solution.
That's a fair point, but AI can do much more than just provide you with an answer like a calculator.
AI can explain the underlying process of manual computation and help you learn it. You can ask it questions when you're confused, and it will keep explaining no matter how off the topic you go.
We don't consider tutoring bad for learning - quite the contrary, we tutor slower students to help them catch up, and advanced students to help them fulfill their potential.
If we use AI as if it was an automated, tireless tutor, it may change learning for the better. Not like it was anywhere near great as it was.
Well, you can lead the horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
If you assume all students are lazy assholes who want to cheat the system, then I doubt there's anything that would help them learn.
There is research that shows that banning calculators impedes the learning of maths. It is certainly not obvious to me that calculators will have a negative effect - I certainly always allowed my kids to use them.
LLMs are trickier and use needs to be restricted to stop cheating, just as my kids had restrictions on what calculators they could use in some exams. That does not mean they are all bad or even net bad if used correctly.
> There is research that shows that banning calculators impedes the learning of maths.
I've seen oodles of research concluding the opposite at the primary level (grades 1- 5, say). If your mentioned research exists, it must be very well hidden :-/
There were 79 studies used in this meta analysis so it cannot be that well hiddne: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1987-11739-001
> There were 79 studies used in this meta analysis so it cannot be that well hiddne: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1987-11739-001
From the first page of that study
> Do calculators threaten basic skills? The answer consistently seemed to be no, provided those basic skills have first been developed with paper and pencil.
So, yeah, there are no studies I have found that support any assertion along the lines of:
>>> There is research that shows that banning calculators impedes the learning of maths.
If you actually find any, we still have to consider that things like this meta-study you posted is already 74-studies ahead in confirming that you are wrong.
Best would be for you to find 75 studies that confirm your hypothesis. Unfortunately, even though I read studies all the time, and even at one point had full access via institutional license to full-text of studies, and spent almost all of my after-hours time between 2009 and 2011 actually reading papers on primary/foundational education, I have not seen even one that supports your assertion.
I have read well over a hundred papers on the subject, and did not find one. I am skeptical that you will find any.
> There is research that shows that banning calculators impedes the learning of maths.
A meta analysis: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1987-11739-001
No this is not the way we want learning to be - just like how students are banned from using calculators until they have mastered the foundational thinking.