Students lack engagement with AI tutoring tools like Khanmigo, prone to hallucinations, and forced usage reduces learning effectiveness
Problem
Students are forced to use AI tutoring tools, but the tools often hallucinate, resulting in incorrect learning content; at the same time, students lack engagement motivation and tend to directly obtain answers rather than think deeply, leading to poor learning outcomes.
Pain points
- Forced use of AI leads to student resistance and aversion to learning
- AI frequently hallucinates or outputs erroneous information, undermining trust
- Students tend to directly obtain answers instead of deep thinking
- Lack of effective onboarding makes it hard to integrate AI tools into the learning workflow
Questions to verify
- How to effectively increase student engagement with AI tutoring tools?
- What are the current limitations of AI tutoring tools in preventing direct answer retrieval?
Evidence
quote · @Anonymous
As a high schooler, the amount of AI forced down our throats is on another level. We have assignments with Claude Prose, tutors that hallucinate, and even gemini in the apps we use to access our assignments. Even my friend's brother(a 4th grader) uses AI to generate pictures for his slideshow about "Penguins". Education is definitely facing a turn, but is it for the worse?
quote · @Anonymous
We saw this when it was released, and it's not because of any amazing prescience. It's just quite obvious when you run a school (we do). It's because AI is focused on making the mechanics easy. But as long as we focus on measurement (how much are they learning) and start from there, the near-term focus is inevitable on the surface mechanics of learning (can they decode or encode when reading, do their tables etc) Meaning > Motivation > Mechanics > Measurement The natural order of learning is when we are allowed to discover, explore, find meaning. This motivates us to get better, mastery, which is where mechanics should come in. And finally, because it is helpful to know where we are generally, we measure some outc
quote · @Anonymous
A very honest take. They tried something, it showed a very small improvement, and they acknowledged it. Acknowledging that the cause appears to be a lack of engagement agrees with my own experience. You can give students great tools but that doesn’t make them interested in math. Khanmigo might be a good tutor but it won’t help unless you’re chaining kids to a desk and not letting them leave until they finish some quota of problems.
quote · @Anonymous
Conclusion: "The binding constraint appears to be engagement: realizing the promise of AI tutoring will require getting students to use it, not just giving them access."
quote · @Anonymous
Yeah I tried Khanmigo with my daughters and it just didn't stick. Tried making my own that just would piece meal out the answer and strive to gamify it with kudos. I feel weird now to think it but some problems are people just trying to shoe horn AI into something and hope it works out. My kids just didn't want to use their brain once something just spat out the answers. Even if it output all the work they'd just keep pressing for the answer and go next. It really showed up in test scores where it wasn't working when their homework was usually A- in algebra. What has helped me when using AI is it gives me a place much faster to be able to start. I can easily take a pic or draw on a tablet and get it classified in a way so I can start helping her. Now the issue is meeting her in the middle s
Disclaimer: this card is distilled by AI from community discussions as “pain point evidence”. It is a starting point for need analysis and validation, not a “validated market need”. AI has analytical limits; please open the original discussion above to manually verify before key decisions.