UC Irvine study shows AI tools like ChatGPT can affect student learning

A study from the University of California, Irvine, shows that access to AI tools like ChatGPT may be impacting how much students are learning. The researchers teamed up with McGraw Hill, an education company, to analyze 3.2 million math questions students had answered in the company's tests. The questions were fairly simple, the type of math problems that are easy for AI to solve. UC Irvine researcher Sina Rismanchian, the study's lead author, explained, "We're trying to see if a student's learning behaviors changed after the introduction of ChatGPT. As you know, these models are very good in solving problems at a high school level." They ran the results from a decade of testing, from 2015 to 2025, comparing the years before and after ChatGPT was available.