Yu and his research colleagues did not intervene any of the students and cannot say with certainty that students used Chatppt or one of his competitors, such as Claude or Gemini, to help them in their homework. But the improvement of students’ writing after the introduction of Chatgpt seems to be more than a simple random coincidence.
Large increases for international students
The unidentified university is a minority service institution with a large number of Hispanic students who have been raised by speaking Spanish at home and a large number of international students who are non -native English speakers. And it was these students, whom the researchers classified as “linguistic disadvantaged”, who saw the greatest setbacks of the quality of writing after the advent of Chatgpt. Students who entered the college with low writing skills, a metric that the university also follows, also experienced excessive gains in their writing quality after Chatgpt. Meanwhile, stronger English speakers and those who entered university with stronger writing capacities have experienced smaller improvements in their writing quality. We do not know if they use less chatgpt, or if the bot offers a less spectacular improvement for a student who already writes quite well.
The gains of “linguistically disadvantaged” students were so strong after the fall of 2023 that the deviation of writing quality between these students and the stronger English speakers has completely evaporated and sometimes reversed. In other words, the quality of writing for students who did not speak English at home and those who entered university with low writing skills were sometimes even stronger than those of students who were raised speaking English at home and those who entered university with stronger writing capacities.
Concentrated gain among high income students
However, these writing quality gains among “linguistic disadvantaged” were concentrated among high income students. The researchers were able to match students’ writing submissions with administrative data on students, including their family income, and they noticed that the drafting of low -income students whose parents did not attend the college did not improve. On the other hand, the drafting of international students with high income with university educated parents has been considerably transformed.
It is a sign that low -income students did not use so much or not as effectively. Socioeconomic differences in the way students benefit from technology are not uncommon. Previous studies on word processing software, for example, have found that high income students tend to be easier to take advantage of the editing features and see greater advantages of writing the capacity to cut and stick and move text.
Mark Warschauer is an education professor at the University of California in Irvine, and director of his digital learning laboratory, where he studies the use of technology in education. Warschauer was not involved in this study and he said that he suspected that the unbalanced advantages for high income students will be ephemeral as low -income students will become more acclimatized and easier with AI over time. “We often see with new technologies that high income people first have access, but it then balances. I believe that low-income people use mobile phones and social media as much as high income in the United States, “he said.
But he predicts that substantial and more important improvements in writing for international students, much more important than for domestic students, will be “greater and lasting”.
Of course, this better writing quality does not mean that these international students really learn to write better, but that indicates that they are able to use technology to present well -written English ideas.
Study researchers have not analyzed ideas, the quality of the analysis or if students’ submissions made sense. And it is not clear if the students fueled reading the chatbot with the teacher’s question and simply copied and glued the chatbot answer to the discussion forum, or if the students really read, have typed preliminary ideas and simply asked the chatbot to polish their writing
In Yu’s own courses at Teachers College, he said that he encourages students to use Chatppt in their writing assignments as long as they recognize and also submit transcriptions of their conversations with AI chatbot. In practice, he said, only a few students admit use it.
He noticed that the writing of students in his classes has improved so far. “This year has been horrible,” he said. More and more of his students have submitted a typical AI production which “seems reasonable but does not make much sense,” he said.
“Everything comes down to motivation,” said Yu. “If they are not motivated to learn, students will only do a misuse of technology.”
Contact the editor Jill presented at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay. 35 on the signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.
