The Same AI Can Help or Harm Learning

Research this week showed that AI support can produce very different outcomes for different students and different tasks. The tool is not neutral, but its effect is also not fixed.

What Happened This Week

On June 9, the Virginia Beach School Board sat through nearly two hours of public comment and then took a 7-4 vote on a substitute Chromebook policy.¹²

On Tuesday, the USC Center for Generative AI and Society released a report drawing on a national survey of a thousand American undergraduates, an experimental trial of a writing tool called ABE, and a survey of more than fifteen hundred teachers across India, the United States, Qatar, Colombia, and the Philippines.³⁴

On Wednesday, June 17, the Wake County Public School System, the largest district in North Carolina, sat with the longest draft of an AI policy the state has yet produced.⁵⁶

On Wednesday, June 24, Microsoft released the third edition of its annual AI in Education Report.⁷⁸

On June 10, the National Center for Education Statistics released the long-term trend assessment for nine- and thirteen-year-olds in reading and mathematics.⁹¹⁰

On June 24, Microsoft released the third edition of its annual AI in Education report.⁷¹¹

On June 24, Gallup released a study of more than 2,400 Gen Zers conducted with the Walton Family Foundation and Harvard's Making Caring Common Project.¹²¹³

What These Stories Have in Common

A model that gives an answer may improve the assignment while weakening the skill the assignment was meant to develop. A model that asks questions can slow the work down enough for the student to notice an error and correct it.

Koan starts from a simple premise. The final answer is no longer a reliable measure of learning. Schools need to understand how students reached that answer and whether the work made them more capable.

What Schools Can Do

Schools should evaluate AI at the level of the interaction. They need to know what the model said, what the student did next, and whether the student became more capable over time.

The educational value of AI is determined by the thinking it creates, not the text it produces.