AI used by thousands of school students with surprising results
Thousands of students use AI at school, and guess what it’s doing to their grades? We take a look at one school with an AI “study buddy”.
Thousands of students are future-proofing their learning thanks to an AI “study buddy” checking their work and giving them feedback.
Teachers are reporting significant improvements in the quality of work submitted and engagement with tasks.
The AI tool in digital learning platform Education Perfect gives students real-time feedback on written work and is being used by 15,000 students at 100 schools across the nation.
Results released by the company show a 47 per cent average improvement in students’ final response quality, with 87 per cent of students more engaged to rework low scoring responses.
More than 90 per cent of teachers thought it had improved learning outcomes.
The findings come as some experts, such as Professor Ken Purnell and Dr Ragnar Purje from Central Queensland University, have found AI tools are dumbing down students so much they can’t remember what they have just written.
But educators at St Mary MacKillop College in Canberra, where students have AI embedded in their assessments and learning tasks, disagree.
The school is using the Education Perfect AI tool to give students instant, detailed feedback on drafts, encouraging them to keep working until the final product is improved.
Trent Wilson, the school’s digital learning co-ordinator, said students were given feedback on the quality of their responses, such as their grammar and punctuation, the way they explained concepts and their sentence structure.
“We are moving beyond focusing only on the risks of AI to equipping students to use AI and giving them the skills,” he said.
“Teachers can see the feedback, see what the students are doing and see who needs added support.”
Mr Wilson said students also liked the immediacy of the feedback and the amount of detail it offered.
Erin White, assistant principal of teaching and learning for the school, said they had involved parents in the use of the tools, including holding an information evening. “This is a tool of support that doesn’t replace thinking,” she said. “We can see students growing in confidence using it.”
Older students at the school are being trained to use an external chatbot called Perplexity to help them transition into a less controlled learning environment after school.
Ms White said it was “still in the early days but has been integrated into classwork and assessments”.
“Students are taught to prompt it and to evaluate their prompts, upload documents and evaluate citations,” she said.
There is even an assessment scale with different levels of AI for students to follow. Mr Wilson said there were some assessment tasks, such as take-home essays, were vulnerable to AI misuse, so the scale was designed to guide them.
Ms White said teachers also used AI, finding it reduced their preparation time and helped them tailor learning resources.
She said AI “was here to stay and that it was important for schools to take the opportunity to explore the opportunities that it brings to enhancing teaching and student learning”.
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Originally published as AI used by thousands of school students with surprising results
