solvo ai homework helper

solvo ai homework helper

The Impact of AI-Powered Homework Helpers on Student Learning

1. Introduction to AI-Powered Homework Helpers

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds great promise for education, particularly in the realm of personalized learning, assessment, and other areas. There is one educational application, however, where AI has been much slower to catch on: homework help. Despite the commonly expressed concerns of parents, teachers, and others in education about overreliance on support tools like homework help websites and apps, such tools remain primarily human-powered. Many education policies created to avoid cheating and plagiarism explicitly ban the use of homework websites. Yet, arguments for and against these tools are almost entirely qualitative with little data to understand their true impact on student learning. This project begins to fill that gap. By harnessing an AI-powered version of an existing expert homework helper designed for college-level students, the project will conduct a large-scale randomized impact evaluation in high school mathematics classrooms in order to understand how using AI-powered homework helpers affects student learning.

2. Benefits of Using AI in Education

AI has many potential applications in education. Of course, it can help automate some of the mind-numbing tasks that educators have to do every day – like grading, giving feedback, and tracking students’ progress on simple problems or tightly constrained tasks. But AI can also help teachers prepare for class by providing analyses of students’ responses and common misconceptions, which can help a teacher understand the students’ learning experience and expertise. This is crucial knowledge as the teacher has to prepare for how to help, engage, and push the students to learn more, and can also help make the non-lecture portion of the classroom experience more structured and engaging. No need to simply ask a question, wait for hands to go up, and then call on one. Furthermore, AI can also extend a teacher’s capacity to give 1-1 or small group instruction. Finally, AI can personalize education for students by providing an adaptive, on-the-fly problem selection for individuals, which can adapt the difficulty based on student needs, expertise, and errors.

Today, many different groups are building educational AI. Some groups, like the one I lead at MIT, Target Teaching, are making AI for teaching K-12 students. Meanwhile, higher education (HE) institutions and ed tech startups are creating educational AI as well. Their products are in Ed research articles, are commercially available as tools, and are used by tens of thousands of students. Some of these AI are for helping deliver traditional homework. They can just provide students hints, give them sample problems, automatically give full or partial credit based on responses, or give targeted, rapid feedback. But there are also other types of AI, like the one from my lab, that take a different perspective on using technology to help students. We argue that AI is better used as an instructional tool instead of a grading or homework delivery tool. We say: let the AI do the teaching!

3. Challenges and Ethical Considerations

Homework-completion systems can only solve for defects in students’ understanding that occur during the homework process, not those that occur before or after. This limits the potential benefit of these systems. On the other hand, we argue that as long as online education platforms do not generate new costs for students or propagate existing inequalities, they should be embraced as a means of providing broad access to educational materials as well as personalized instruction. Given that grades and performance profiles accurately capture student performance, and especially since students derive rich benefits from high-quality education both privately and socially, the United States could do well to embrace a system in which more students are self-paced with the aid of AI-powered homework helpers.

Returning to the reasons why some teachers and students may not endorse or use artificially intelligent homework helpers, it is worth noting that these represent, essentially, growing pains during the transition to our recommended idealized educational system. Teachers are accustomed to and take much pride in creating custom content for their class. With the rise of AI-powered homework helpers, much of the expected to be replaced by off-the-shelf content, i.e., assignments developed by colleague-teachers at the same grade level. Agencies like Eureka Math that focus solely on content development are unlikely to cover all possible levels and high-school topics.

4. Case Studies and Success Stories

Case studies and success stories from public discourse offer further confirmation. One school district in Kentucky, for instance, is using AI to create instant feedback for its students’ essays, with the result that many students improved several years on essay scores. Similarly, when the Minneapolis Public Schools and Calcasieu Parish Public Schools integrated AI tools for math instruction into their curricula, teachers and administrators reported greater student confidence, improved skills, and quantifiable prior-year growth on benchmark assessments. An administrator from one school district reportedly said: “Brigance has been a game changer for our students. It is amazing to see students grow their math skills two to three grade levels over the year.”

There are also case studies suggesting that the positive effect of AI is not limited to American students. For example, adaptive learning platforms from Newton, a Brazilian AI company, are reportedly contributing to significant progress and encouragement among students, many of whom were unable to do so with traditional methods. A program called “Saarthi”, powered by an AI developed by the Canadian company Amira, purportedly led to exceptional success in one school in India, where it is being implemented according to a news report. Preliminary results, reflecting not only learning gains but also a change in the level of learner engagement and retention, show an increase of 20-25% in math skills for all learners in just a matter of weeks.

5. Future Directions and Recommendations

Many questions remain unaddressed, some of which are particularly relevant for the design of future intelligent educational technologies. For example, because some students are using AI homework helpers, educational aides, and tutors, do the course instructors’ exam and assignment designs, problem statement designs, and content choices need to change in response? As a first step to answering this amalgam of questions, researchers would benefit from interacting with and learning from educators’ experiences of using AI homework helpers in their classrooms. This could be followed by designing, implementing, and scrutinizing collaborative homework designs where several small groups, some with, and others without, an AI homework helper, work in parallel on the same problem and solution.

Intelligent educational technology will remain effective only as long as it is well designed for today’s students’ needs and effective at supporting students’ learning. At present, AI homework helpers are improving some students’ problem-solving learning, but they are also having variable impacts on those students’ overall learning, learning pathways, and authentic understanding. To design intelligent educational technology that is effective at developing both students’ conceptual understanding and cognitive transfer, researchers must engage with educators in jointly determining the relative importance, content, form, timing, frequency, and effectiveness of their chosen instructional uses for that educational technology. All AI tools, including AI homework helpers, should respect student data privacy and promote students’ data security.