The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education
Using 30 months of panel data on 26,811 Chinese students in grades 7-12, we study how generative AI affects homework productivity and learning. The data combine monthly closed-book exams, high-school and college entrance exams, and homework scores and completion time across nine subjects. We exploit staggered AI adoption in a difference-in-differences design. AI adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowers monthly exam scores by 20% within six months. High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24%, with the full penalty emerging only after about two years. The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys. The learning losses are concentrated among roughly 80% of AI users whose behavior is consistent with homework outsourcing, as indicated by exceptionally short homework completion time coupled with high homework scores. AI users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-AI users experience small learning losses.
Edit: moving my comment up here
Just in case as it’s formatted a bit weirdly
X-Axis: Homework scores
Y-Axis: Exam scores
Side tangent, but Lemmy is the worst with sources.
If I were admin, I’d make all users, new and extant, take an 8-minute course on clicking through reposts to finding original sources before they are allowed to submit posts.
That’s my rant.
I don’t think you can prevent this from being posted, though I agree that resource should be available. It’s just that our attention spans have evaporated, everything must be instant and with LLMs it’s only accelerating.
This is about having a brief second of critical thinking and then not upvote or downvote the low effort post and upvote the first critical thinking comment.
Another thing on Lemmy is that we have half a dozen “users” who don’t care about the content, they just automatically post high engagement content from other platforms and post it here (without declaring themselves as a bot account too). And the mindless scrollers (at least 60-70%) going by this post, just take the bait.
Not having karma didn’t help much in hindsight.