Pros and cons of AI for learning

Hi. I'm Dr. Cynthia Nebel. I'm the director of learning services at St. Louis University School of Medicine, and today I'm going to talk to you about the pros and cons of artificial intelligence for learning.

I want to start with this quote from Daniel Willingham, who says that "Memory is the residue of thought." What that really means is that the things that we think about really become our memories. So it's not as if when you're sitting in a lecture, memories are formed simply by your instructor saying things to you. Rather, memories are formed by how you think about that material.

What and how you think genuinely changes your brain and creates the neural networks that make up our memory that we can come back to later on.

I want to give you a little demo to show you exactly what I mean by this. I'm going to give you a math problem, and I want you to try to solve this math problem in your head. Here is this first math problem: 37+15+12. I'm just going to give you 10 seconds here to try to come up with the answer. Hopefully, you arrived at 64. If you didn't, it's okay; I didn't give you a lot of time. But what were you doing in your brain as you were trying to figure out that answer? There are a lot of different ways that you can try to solve this problem. You might have said, "Hmmm, 30+10+10 is 50. Now, I'm going to add five and two; that's seven, and another seven is 14, so 50 and 14 is 64." Or you might have said, "Uh! 37, that's a big number. Instead, I'm going to add 15 and 12, and that's 27, and 27 and 37,...", and did it that way. There's no right or wrong answer here. But the key is you went through some sort of mental wrestling to arrive at 64. Now the question is whether that mental wrestling that you experienced will help you on the next problem. So I'm going to give you another math problem, and we'll see if you can get the answer faster. Here it is: 37+15+12. Hopefully you've already gotten the answer, which is 64; so hey, it worked, right? No, obviously this is a silly demonstration. But it's to show you that when you went through the mental wrestling that you needed to do on the first problem, you learned something. When I gave you the second problem and you were able to just say 64, you didn't have to do any mental wrestling, and therefore, you probably didn't learn much. It's that mental wrestling that leads to long-term learning.