A group of Stanford University researchers started with one question: Could a human tutor providing motivation and support get students to spend more time working with an AI literacy tutor?
The answer turned out be yes — but only between one and four minutes more per week. Many students never logged on at all.
That left the researchers with a different set of questions.
“A key finding that we weren’t even meaning to test is that having access to this AI tutor isn’t the same as using it,” said Carly Robinson, the lead author on the study released Wednesday and the director of research for the SCALE Initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.
Robinson said this doesn’t necessarily mean AI tutoring doesn’t work. “We never really got close enough to the dosage needed to find out.”
The study adds to a very limited research base for AI tools in education as many school districts are looking for ways to maintain or increase tutoring that costs less than hiring people to do the work. It also aligns with the experience of Khanmigo founder Sal Khan, who recently acknowledged that students didn’t engage much with the AI tutor he initially hoped would revolutionize education.
Robinson and her colleagues worked with two school districts serving high-poverty populations using the same AI learning platform in different tutoring settings. Neither the districts nor the learning platform are named in the study.
In one school district, elementary children were supposed to use the literacy tutor during homework time in an afterschool program. In the other, early elementary students were supposed to use the AI tutor during class time.
The learning platform provider said that students would show improvement in their reading skills with at least 30 minutes of use a week. The goal was for students to complete two 30-minute sessions each week.
