by BrainStream CEO Steve Alcorn
As educators begin to acknowledge that AI is not going away, they are looking for ways to incorporate AI as a study tool rather than just a way to find answers.
An article on Ars Technica describes a new ChatGPT feature called study mode:
Study Mode isn’t a new ChatGPT model but a series of “custom system instructions” written for the LLM “in collaboration with teachers, scientists, and pedagogy experts to reflect a core set of behaviors that support deeper learning,” OpenAI said. Instead of the usual summary of a subject that stock ChatGPT might give—which one OpenAI employee likened to “a mini textbook chapter”—Study Mode slowly rolls out new information in a “scaffolded” structure. The mode is designed to ask “guiding questions” in the Socratic style and to pause for periodic “knowledge checks” and personalized feedback to make sure the user understands before moving on.
The crucial sentence in this article is:
It’s unknown how many students will use this guided learning tool instead of just asking ChatGPT to generate answers from the start.
One can guess that few students will choose the more difficult and time-consuming approach.
BrainStream’s approach to restricting the study materials to a specific test and collecting metrics on how that text is used solves this problem.