Generative AI Without Guardrails Can Harm Learning: Evidence from High School Mathematics

Summary

A trial with nearly 1,000 high school math students compared a regular ChatGPT-style tutor to one prompted to safeguard learning. Both improved practice scores hugely, but on a test without AI the regular-tutor students did 17% worse than students who never had AI at all; the safeguarded version erased that gap, because the difference comes down to whether the student uses AI as a crutch to copy or as a teacher to learn from.