The Effects of Chatbots on Learning in Higher Education

With generative AI and easily accessible chatbots becoming ever more present, educators and institutions are concerned about the impact of these new technologies’ effects on students. Beyond concerns about plagiarism or cheating, educators are worried that improper use of these tools will prevent students from gaining the skills they need. One study from MIT even shows that using ChatGPT during essay writing leads to lower brain connectivity, which they term “cognitive debt”.

Shiri Melumad, Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees that AI will “make your life a lot easier.” But she goes on to advise that “to the extent that you actually care about learning more deeply about something, you should really try to avoid starting off your research with an LLM because it’s too tempting to stop with the syntheses that you’re provided. I even see it in myself. I’ve studied this stuff and when I start with ChatGPT to learn about something, I find it really hard to motivate [myself] to keep learning more.”

Schools are working to define AI policies for their students as these technologies advance. Tim Requarth, Director of graduate science writing and Research Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Physiology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, wrote about his experience and thoughts following a faculty meeting to define the school’s policies.

“If writing is a form of thinking,” writes Requarth, “if the struggle to articulate an idea is part of how you come to understand it, then tools that bypass that struggle might degrade a scientist’s capacity for the kind of thinking that matters most for actual discovery.”

Chatbots like Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, or Anthropic’s Claude allow users to generate massive amounts of coherent text in very short periods of time. These tools are both trained on and able to synthesize wide amounts of provided text to provide comprehensive summaries to users in seconds.

However, studies have shown that when these tools are used to augment a student’s own thinking and work, they can see positive effects. A study coming from the University of South Alabama showed that college students who interacted with ChatGPT by critically examining the answers provided and engaging in follow-up questions had better performance in a physics course than students who asked fewer, surface-level questions of ChatGPT.

We should therefore encourage students to engage with these tools wisely. To reiterate Melumad’s point: to the extent that students wish to learn, they should be encouraged use their own thinking power more than they use ChatGPT’s data centers.