CS Colloquium Speaker: Hamsa Bastani, University of Pennsylvania Date & Time: Tuesday, May 5 - 12:10pm Location: CS 105 Event page: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/events/unpacking-unintended-consequences-ai-edu... Webinar registration: https://princeton.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lKB_0wIFQnWF3YfnIgL7tw Title: Unpacking the Unintended Consequences of AI in Education Abstract: The rapid integration of AI into educational settings presents challenges and opportunities—this talk will discuss findings from three large-scale field studies investigating the impact of AI on student learning. First, we found that unfettered access to ChatGPT negatively impacted short-term student learning outcomes in high school mathematics. Second, to understand longer-term effects, we examined learning in chess academies. Contrary to the popular strategy of promoting student agency, our findings show that self-regulated learning (where students decide when to request AI help) can substantially harm learning by undermining productive struggle and motivation. Third, we found that carefully designed AI can be a potent way to boost productive struggle—we leverage student-chatbot interactions (which encode rich information about the student’s knowledge state) to personalize practice problems, significantly improving learning over a 5-month Python certification course. Taken together, these studies suggest that while providing students with unguided AI tools can be detrimental, targeted AI tools that are designed to critically engage students can be beneficial. Bio: Hamsa Bastani is an Associate Professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on developing novel machine learning algorithms for social impact, including in healthcare and education. She has worked with national governments to deploy algorithms at the country scale for targeted border COVID-19 screening and essential medicine access, and co-led one of the first large field studies of generative AI tutors in high schools. Her research has been published in leading outlets including Nature, Management Science, Operations Research, and PNAS, and has garnered numerous recognitions, including the Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research, the INFORMS Pierskalla Award for best healthcare paper, and the George Nicholson Prize.