Yu and his research colleagues did not interview any of the students and cannot say with certainty that the students were using chatgpt or any of the competitors, such as Claude or Gemini, to help them with their tasks. But the improvement in the writing of the students after the introduction of Chatgpt seems to be more than a random coincidence.
Great playbacks for international students
The unidentified university is a minority institution that serves with a large number of Hispanic students who were raised in Spanish at home and a large number of international students who are not speakers of non -native English. And it was the thesis students, to whom the researchers classified as “disadvantaged linguistic”, who saw the eldest sudden in the quality of writing after the advent of Chatgpt. Students who entered the university with weak writing skills, a metric that tracks the university, also saw huge profits in their ingenious quality after chatgpt. Meanwhile, the stronger English speakers and those who entered the university with stronger writing skills saw smaller improvements in their writing. It is an uncle if they are using less chatgpt, or if the bone sacrifices a less dramatic improvement for a student who is very well writing.
The profits for “disadvantaged lingystericitary” students were so strong after the 2023 fall that the gap in the quality of writing between students and the strongest English speakers evaporated and sometimes they were invested. In other words, the quality of writing for the students who did not speak English at home and those who entered the university with weak writing skills was sometimes equally stronger than of the students who raised speaking English at home and those who entered the university.
Concentrated profits among high -income students
However, these profits in the quality of writing among the “disadvantaged linguistic” were concentrated among higher income students. The researchers were able to match the writing presentations of the students with administrative data on the students, including their family income, and noticed that the writing of low -income students whose parents did not attend the university did not improve so much. On the contrary, the writing of international students of high income with parents with university education was significantly transformed.
That is a sign that low -income students are rushed by the use of chatgpt quite or not so effective. The socio -economic differences in how students benefit from technology are not uncommon. Previous studies Or the text processing software, for example, has discovered that higher income students tend to be easier to take advantage of the editing characteristics and see greater writing benefits of the ability to cut and paste text.
Mark Warsawer is a professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, and director of his Digital Learning Laboratorywhere he studies the use of technology in education. Warsawuer did not participate in this study and said that he suspects that the benefits cut for higher income students will be fleet as low -income students become more acclimatized and easier with AI over time. “We see with new technologies that high -income people get access first, but then balances. I think that low -income people use cell phones and social networks as well as income people in the United States,” he said.
But he predicts that substantial and major improvements in writing for international students, much larger than students who are “more important and durable.”
Of course, this improved writing quality does not mean that international thesis students are learning better to write better, but it does indicate that they make experts in using technology to present well written ideas.
The study researchers did not analyze the ideas, the quality of the analysis or if the students’ presentations made sense. And it is not clear if the students fed the chatbot reading along with the teacher’s question and simply copied and hit the chatbot answer on the discussion board, or if the students really read, they wrote some preliminary ideas and only asked the chatbot to polish their writing.
In Yu’s own classes in Teachers College, he said that it encourages students to use chatgpt in their writing tasks as long as they recognize it and also send transcripts of their conversations with the AI Chatbot. In practice, he said, only a few students admit to using it.
He realized that the writing of the students in their classes had improved so far. “This year has a horrible real leg,” he said. More and more of their students have a typical AI production that “seems reasonable but does not make much sense,” he said.
“Everything is reduced to motivation,” Yu said. “If they are not motivated to learn, students will only misuse what technology is.”
Contact with the staff writer Jill Barhay to 212-678-3595, Jillbarshay.35 in the signal, or barshay@hecheningerreport.org.
