"Great tutoring works, but great tutors are hard to find," writes Sean Geraghty on Education Next. Can AI tutors fill the gap?
A math teacher and education consultant, Geraghty predicts AI tutors could help motivated, capable students, but do little for the average students, a thesis echoed in Laurence Holt's The 5% Problem.
Nash Goldstein, an 11th grader in the top 5 percent academically, writes about using AI to learn AP Statistics.
At first, GPT just gave him the answers rather than helping him work through the problem. The Claude 3.5 Sonnet was very similar.
Geraghty helped create a Custom GPT to mimic a human math tutor. the custom AI asks questions to guide the student to solve the problem and tries to speak plainly.
The down side, writes Nash, is that "sometimes it breaks the steps down too much," making it hard to see "the big picture and why you were doing what you were doing."
I was often progressing from “half know” to “full know.” I could get the gist of what was happening pretty quickly, and the (AI) could get me to the finish line. But I think this would go badly with struggling students who have little base knowledge in a topic. A human tutor would be much better at getting someone from “no idea” to “half know.”
Nash asked questions to see if he could "go deeper — to learn not just how but why — to go beyond 'full know' to 'mega know'." The explanations were helpful. But the student has to be able to ask the right questions, he points out. A human tutor knows how to motivate. AI doesn't.
In his learning efficiency rankings, GPT is first and Claude second with normal classroom teaching third, the textbook fourth and online videos in last place.
But efficiency isn't everything, he concludes. "I still enjoy learning at school more than trying to learn things on my own."
"No human tutor is as fast or intellectually versatile as state-of-the-art (Large Language Models), as long as the prompts they’re fed are clear and specific," writes Geraghty. "I can imagine motivated kids in the 5 percent really enjoying interactions with an LLM — the opportunity to go back and forth about a topic at any time and in any depth." However, he estimates that even AI customized to act like a real tutor "would be worse than a typical human tutor for 80 percent of (students), the same for 15 percent, and better for 5 percent."
It's not just the motivation problem, he adds. "When I asked Nash if some of his peers would use LLMs as just an 'answer-giver,' he just smiled; of course they would."
If Nash studied AP Stats with the customized GPT tutor for six weeks -- and stopped going to class -- he'd be able to score a perfect 5 on the exam, Geraghty believes. But he doesn't want to miss the class discussions, his teachers, the camaraderie.
Some top 5 percent students might prefer a self-paced GPT-run course, especially if they could do it with a few friends, he speculates. And the AI tools are getting better. But, so far, he doesn't see an AI tutoring solution for average students.
Jen Stauffer, a chemistry teacher, writes about how to customize a GPT tutor.
Khan Academy also has an AI tutor specifically tuned to teach, rather than just answer questions. I haven't used it, but the demos are pretty incredible.