A study from the University of California, Irvine, shows that access to AI tools like ChatGPT may be impacting how much students are learning.
The researchers teamed up with McGraw Hill, an education company, to analyze 3.2 million math questions students had answered in the company’s tests. The questions were fairly simple, the type of math problems that are easy for AI to solve.
UC Irvine researcher Sina Rismanchian, the study’s lead author, explained, “We’re trying to see if a student’s learning behaviors changed after the introduction of ChatGPT. As you know, these models are very good in solving problems at a high school level.”
They ran the results from a decade of testing, from 2015 to 2025, comparing the years before and after ChatGPT was available. They could see students were spending significantly less time solving those problems once they had access to AI. For high school students, the results were especially dramatic, as it took them 30% less time to complete the test than the students before them who didn’t have access to AI.
That may sound like a real benefit, but here’s the problem. Those tests had not been supervised. When compared to tests that were proctored and in which students did not have access to AI, the researchers could see the impact on learning. In the proctored test, the data showed students started getting many more of the problems wrong the year ChatGPT became available. It appeared those who had used AI to do the math faster hadn’t actually learned to do those problems themselves.
Rismanchian said, “It’s been kind of established in learning theories that the students need to struggle with the problems and the cognitive process of solving problems to learn them.” He continued, “It means that students are spending less time on this struggle here, and then at the end, it comes at the cost of their durable learning outcomes in the test.”
Despite these findings, Rismanchian noted that AI can still be used to enhance learning when applied appropriately. That includes tools that provide feedback to students, for instance, using AI to analyze and suggest improvements on essays the students write themselves.
“So there are ways to include AI in students’ learning processes to augment that process, but it depends on the way that the students are using these tools,” he said.
The research underscores the importance of using AI as a tool to support learning rather than as a replacement for the problem-solving process.
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