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Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute have known that practice is essential for learning. But in a new study, they wanted to test whether adding AI-generated feedback and prompts that force students to reflect on their mistakes would improve outcomes even more.

The results were surprising: people who spent more time reflecting did not learn more. In fact, they sometimes learned less.

The research will be presented at the Learning @ Scale conference. A preprint of their paper, " Benefit or Bottleneck? Assessing the Impact of Structured Reflection on Learning from AI-Driven Explanatory Feedback ," is available now.

Practice makes perfect

In earlier research, Paulo Carvalho, an assistant professor at the HCII, and Michael Asher, an HCII project scientist, explored how to keep students practicing in the first place.…