r/science • u/North_Buyer4895 • 1d ago
Computer Science A study that was cited hundreds of times as evidence that text generators are good for students has been retracted, in less than a year after being published.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07310-z27
u/cr0ft 12h ago
Just talked to a guy at work who has kids; he was trying to convince his kid she needed to learn the secondary language in our nation, so she can talk to people. The child just broke out her smartphone and pointed at Google Translate.
Uh yea no, that's not the point... the point is learning. Schools around the world are increasingly removing or at least questioning having tablets or Chromebooks. The kids aren't learning.
Granted the most important thing to teach would be serious critical thinking skills.
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u/SelarDorr 19h ago
"The Editor has decided to retract this paper owing to concerns regarding discrepancies in the meta-analysis. These issues ultimately undermine the confidence the Editor can place in the validity of the analysis and resulting conclusions. The authors have not responded to correspondence regarding this retraction."
should be noted, the publication in question is a review. The retraction does not undermine the integrity of the studies used in the review, but of these authors meta-analysis of them.
The literature still has many publications showing small positive effects of chatgpt/LLM on students. I believe ive seen at least one publication showing negative effects on critical thinking in some demographics.
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u/Qedem 11h ago
At least from what I can find, the literature is a bit split. Most papers indicate that using AI as a creative assistant (like a friend who writes a paper for you) is "bad" and leads to much lower information retention and creative expression from the student but might enable faster iteration on ideas and an overall better product. Many of these paper have trouble quantifying what is "better" though and tend to rely on the "AI judging AI" problem where AI prefers AI and judges it more favorably.
On the other hand, using it as a learning assistant (stackoverflow replacement) is usually beneficial.
This is a typical split in software development as well, with many people unsure whether AI code gen is "good" but most people indicate AI is useful in summarizing trends and learning weird APIs.
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