The Impact of AI on Education & What It Means for Work

May 10, 2025 / AI, education

The blocky charts. The ability to solve a hard test problem. The hidden game of Snake. My graphing calculator was a 7th grade miracle.

AI is this generation’s graphing calculator. With about 2 years’ of studies, we can draw some conclusions on its impact. A meta-analysis published in Nature showed a medium to large impact on students.

ChatGPT’s Select Impact on Higher-Order Thinking

Condition/Scenario	Effect Size¹	Significance (p-value)
Overall Effect	0.457	< 0.001
Type of Course: STEM and related	0.737	< 0.001
Learning Model: Personalized learning	0.718	< 0.001
Learning Model: Mixed	0.719	< 0.001
Duration: 4-8 weeks	0.654	< 0.001
Role of ChatGPT: Intelligent tutor	0.945	< 0.001
Role of ChatGPT: Intelligent learning tool	0.428	< 0.001
Area of Application: Tutoring	0.478	< 0.05

The higher the Effect Size, the greater the Effect. 0.3-0.5 is considered a medium sized effect. Above 0.5 is considered a large effect.

As a tutor creating lessons & a personalized teacher answering questions to meet a student, AI improves higher-order thinking materially. This analysis supports the intuition behind AI as a personal Socrates.

Not every effect is strong in the study : longer use of AI reduces the Effect Size by half (still an effect of 0.332).

If this is true within education, the need for AI at work is more acute.

Elevating colleagues’ time & focus on higher-order thinking should provide a strong business competitive advantage. This effect might be short-lived - a jump start provides an early advantage - that is mitigated as more of the industry adopts AI.

The study suggests at work AI can function as a coach helping us improve how we sell, how we market, how we run companies. AI can help us learn about our industry, amalgamating insights across media & internal documents, & learn new skills.

And more familiarity with tools should enable compounded learning.

¹See more about Hedges’ G