Mastering AI for Study: Tips to enhance learning without overreliance

Sydney (The Conversation): Artificial intelligence (AI) gives high school and university students access to a tool that can potentially do all their work for them. This may reduce their stress in the short term when handing in assignments, but it could harm their learning in the long term.

As high school and university students enter the end-of-year exam period, they may look for ways to use AI in their studies.

I study how people learn.

My recent research suggests that students need to learn basic knowledge and skills well before using AI to help them study.

Is using AI for study worthwhile?

Research gives mixed answers to this question.

One study suggests that using AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, while studying may improve learning, motivation, critical thinking and creative thinking. It may also reduce the mental effort needed to complete tasks.

Other reviews have highlighted the benefits of AI, such as adapting learning to each student, giving feedback quickly and helping students stay interested.

However, some researchers have questioned these claims because the studies mentioned above used weak research methods and did not clearly explain how they were carried out.

This does not mean students should never use AI to study. But they need to understand the risks.

What to watch out for

One risk is called "cognitive offloading". This happens when students rely so much on AI to do their work that they let it do all the thinking for them.

Students who regularly let AI do the thinking may stop studying before they have truly learned the material.

When you shouldn't use AI

The risk of "cognitive offloading" means you should not use AI for every part of your revision, especially when taking practice exams.

Research shows that the best way to practise for an exam is to copy the conditions of the real exam. In most cases, this means closing your laptop, putting your phone away, setting a timer for the same length as the exam, and seeing what you can remember and write on your own.

If you use AI to help with practice exams, it may make you feel more confident than you should. AI can improve your performance for a short time. But when you take the real exam, your performance may drop sharply, showing how much you have actually learned.

A study in China, published in June, looked at how high school students' use of AI affected their overall learning. The findings showed that AI helped students get better homework scores, but their monthly exam scores also fell by about 20 per cent over six months.

With this in mind, how can you use AI effectively to help you study?

Using AI to revise

Before asking AI a study question, try to remember the information, explain it, solve a problem, summarise the ideas or write about the topic yourself.

Once you have shown that you can remember the material correctly on your own, you can use AI to organise your notes and find anything you may have missed. If you want to challenge yourself, you can ask AI to create practice exam questions that become harder one by one. For example, you could ask it to:

"Create five exam-style questions about [topic]. Make each question harder than the one before it. Do not show me the answers until I have tried each question."

Using AI for feedback

You may have just finished writing a practice essay or answering several short-answer questions. Now you want to find out how well you did.

You can use AI to:

• give feedback suited to your needs

• make your explanations easier to understand

• check the facts in your work

• offer arguments against your ideas and explain other possible answers.

You could try a prompt like this:

"Here is my answer to an exam question. Do not rewrite it for me. Tell me what I did well, what is wrong or missing, and the three changes that would improve my answer the most. Check your feedback against the marking criteria I provide."

Finding a healthy balance

Even when you are not taking practice exams, it is a good idea to put your devices away and spend longer periods studying without technology. This also helps you avoid distractions from notifications.

If you are tired of studying alone and want to connect with other people, consider meeting friends in a small group to prepare for exams. AI can sometimes help, but giving and receiving feedback from other people can challenge you and keep you involved in ways that technology cannot.

When in doubt, remember this simple rule: think for yourself first, then use AI—or do not use it at all when it is not needed.