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by red_admiral 23 days ago
There's a famous post by Erik Hoel that calls the human version of this Aristocratic Tutoring [1] (Scott Alexander is unconvinced [2]).

In the 1980s, a researcher called Benjamin Bloom claimed a z=2.0 (that is 2σ) advantage for a combination of mastery learning (don't move on the the next topic until you've mastered the current one) and 1-on-1 tutoring. Later replications show there is definitely something going on, but the effect size is much lower, for example around z=0.7 in a 2020 paper [3].

I'm still open on AI tutoring, though the Dartmouth results look impressive. Someone please try and replicate this.

There's a saying that AI helps the best students get better, and the worst ones get worse. (Anthropic sort-of agrees [4].) It'll be interesting to see how that turns out.

[1] https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-we-stopped-mak... [2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hoel-on-aristocratic... [3] https://www.nber.org/papers/w27476 [4] https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...