This week New York City Public Schools announced that it was putting a one-year moratorium on student-facing AI tools It covers children from 2-K, the city’s program for two-year-olds, all the way through eighth grade. That is around 600,000 students, or roughly two-thirds of the district.
Later that day, Los Angeles Unified School District confirmed something even broader. Generative AI access was being removed for students on district-issued devices across the district for the school year.
...
What the tutoring evidence says
There is also a growing body of evidence about what happens when AI is used directly with students.
Stanford’s National Student Support Accelerator and its AI Hub for Education recently reviewed research on AI tutoring. One of the most interesting conclusions was that the strongest results were found where AI supported human tutors. AI-only tutoring was much less convincing.
In some of the studies, engagement was a serious problem. In two randomized trials, 40% to 47% of students never used the AI platform at all, while those who did averaged only two to five minutes per week. There is an assumption behind quite a lot of education technology that giving a student access to a useful tool means they will naturally use it in a useful way. Often they do not.
