An AI-powered digital tutoring assistant designed by Stanford University researchers shows modest promise at improving students’ short-term performance in math, suggesting that the best use of artificial intelligence in virtual tutoring for now might be in supporting, not supplanting, human instructors.
The open-source tool, which researchers say other educators can recreate and integrate into their tutoring systems, made the human tutors slightly more effective. And the weakest tutors became nearly as effective as their more highly-rated peers, according to a study released Monday.
The tool, dubbed Tutor CoPilot, prompts tutors to think more deeply about their interactions with students, offering different ways to explain concepts to those who get a problem wrong. It also suggests hints or different questions to ask.
The new study offers a middle ground in what’s become a polarized debate between supporters and detractors of AI tutoring. It’s also the first randomized controlled trial — the gold standard in research — to examine a human-AI system in live tutoring. In all, about 1,000 students got help from about 900 tutors, and students who worked with AI-assisted tutors were four percentage points more likely to master the topic after a given session than those in a control group whose tutors didn’t work with AI.
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