Briefs · Education and Upskilling
Want Students to Think With AI? Raise the Stakes.
Give students an AI tutor and they will ignore it. Grade the conversation and they will think.
That is the lesson of ‘One Click Away’, a National Bureau of Economic Research paper (Philip Oreopoulos and Nina Low) that followed Khanmigo in 18 Tennessee middle schools for two years: 96% of students tried the AI tutor at least once, but the median student used it only a third of the days they had access to it, and the math gains were no better than Khan Academy practice without AI. Sal Khan’s verdict: ‘how much motivation matters’.
The author’s fix is to make the conversation itself the assessment: in a small study with Aimée Skidmore (21 students, Collège du Léman, Switzerland), students were graded on how precisely they questioned the AI and whether they kept ownership of the thinking — 18 of 21 said their approach changed. In role-plays run through his AI Friction Labs, five students who retook a calculus exercise scored about 34 points higher the second time.
Conclusion: AI is not a tutor. It is an exam with a chat window.
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