
Ed-Technical
Join two former teachers - Libby Hills from the Jacobs Foundation and AI researcher Owen Henkel - for the Ed-Technical podcast series about AI in education. Each episode, Libby and Owen will ask experts to help educators sift the useful insights from the AI hype. They’ll be asking questions like - how does this actually help students and teachers? What do we actually know about this technology, and what’s just speculation? And (importantly!) when we say AI, what are we actually talking about?
Ed-Technical
Why Language Models are suck ups and how this can be bad for learning
In this short, Libby and Owen discuss recent research from Anthropic looking at sycophancy – the tendency to agree with users – in large language models (LLMs), and key research from educational psychology about how important feedback is for learning. Libby and Owen connect the two papers and explore why sycophancy is especially a problem when it comes to using LLMs for educational purposes.
Links:
- Anthropic paper on sycophancy in language models
- John Hattie and Helen Timberley’s paper, The Power of Feedback
Join us on social media:
- BOLD (@BOLD_insights), Libby Hills (@Libbylhhills) and Owen Henkel (@owen_henkel)
- Listen to all episodes of Ed-Technical here: https://bold.expert/ed-technical
- Subscribe to BOLD’s newsletter: https://bold.expert/newsletter
- Stay up to date with all the latest research on child development and learning: https://bold.expert
Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design