Who is the biggest early beneficiary of Chatgpt? International Students
Yu and his research colleagues did not interview any students, nor could they be sure that students were using Chatgpt or any of their competitors, such as Claude or Gemini, to help them complete their tasks. However, the improvement in student writing after the introduction of chatgpt seems to be more than just a random coincidence.
Significant growth in international students
The unidentified university is a minority service with a large number of Hispanic students who raise Spanish at home and a large number of international students are non-native English speakers. It was these students who categorized the researchers as “languagely vulnerable” who saw the greatest growth in writing quality after Chatgpt appeared. Students entering university writing skills, which is an indicator of university tracking, have also gained a huge benefit in their writing quality after Chatgpt. Meanwhile, stronger English speakers and those who entered college with stronger writing abilities have less quality of writing. It is unclear whether they use Chatgpt less or that the robot provides less dramatic improvements to students who already write pretty well.
After the fall of 2023, the benefits of “languagely disadvantaged” students are so great that the quality gap between these students and stronger English speakers completely evaporates, sometimes even reversed. In other words, the writing quality for students who do not speak English at home and those who enter college with weak writing abilities are sometimes even stronger than those who raise English at home and enter college with stronger writing abilities.
The income is concentrated among high-income students
However, these writing quality benefits in “linguistically disadvantaged” are concentrated among higher-income students. The researchers were able to match students’ writing opinions with administrative data for students including student income (including family income), and they noted that low-income students whose parents did not go to college did not make much progress in writing. In contrast, the writing of high-income international students changes significantly in college education parents.
This shows that low-income students are not as efficient in using Chatgpt. Socio-economic differences in which students benefit from technology are not uncommon. For example, previous research on word processing software found that higher-paid students tend to be easier to leverage editing capabilities and gain greater writing benefits from the ability to cut, paste and move text.
Mark Warschauer is a professor of education at the University of California, Irvine and director of its Digital Learning Lab, where he studied the use of technology in education. Warschauer, who was not involved in the study, said that as low-income students have more adaptable and easier AI preferences over time, he suspected that the benefits of bias from high-income students will be fleeting. “We often see high-income people get access first through new technologies, but then balance it out. I believe low-income people use mobile phones as much as social media as high-income people in the U.S.,” he said.
But he predicts that the substantial and greater advances in written writing by international students will be “more important and durable.”
Of course, this improved writing quality does not mean that these international students are actually learning better writing, but it does show that they are good at using technology to come up with ideas in well-written English.
The researchers in the study did not analyze whether these ideas were meaningful, whether the quality or the significance of student submissions made sense. It is not clear whether students sent the reading to the chatbot along with the professor’s question and simply copied and pasted the chatbot’s answer, or whether the students actually did the reading themselves, typed some preliminary ideas just asking the chatbot to polish their writing.
In Yu’s course at Teachers College, he said he encouraged students to use Chatgpt in their writing assignments as long as they acknowledge that and also submitted transcripts of conversations with AI Chatbot. In fact, only a few students admitted to using it, he said.
He noticed that so far, the writing of students’ writing has been improving. “This year is actually terrible,” he said, adding that more and more of his students submit typical AI output, “looks reasonable, but doesn’t make much sense.”
“It all depends on motivation,” Yu said. “If they don’t have the motivation to learn, then students will be able to use the technology badly.”
Contact the worker Jill Barshay At 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 about signal or barshay@hechingerreport.org.
