When AI Asks the Questions, Human Beings Can Benefit

"Asking a question is often thought of as a way to solicit information, or in some situations, assess what one already knows-as in taking a test. Research from the learning sciences, however, has shown that questions can benefit learning in yet other ways. For instance, we can use questions to practice recalling important information or to help us think more deeply about a topic."

"A growing body of research has found that pre-questioning can substantially improve one's ability to pay attention to, learn from, and remember the content of textbooks, videos, and lectures. Given this phenomenon-which is formally known as the "pre-questioning effect"-it might seem sensible for teachers to implement pre-questioning in their classrooms, or for individual learners to use pre-questioning on their own. Yet pre-questioning requires a crucial ingredient: the questions themselves. In many situations, such questions are not readily available."

Pre-questioning involves guessing answers to questions about an unfamiliar topic before instruction, then learning the correct answers. Pre-questioning boosts attention, encoding, and later recall for textbooks, videos, and lectures. The effect, called the pre-questioning effect, arises because generating guesses directs focus and primes relevant knowledge. Access to suitable questions is a barrier: many classrooms and individual learners lack ready questions and teachers often lack time to create them. New research shows AI-generated practice questions can produce substantial pre-questioning effects, and modern chatbots can generate questions with depth and difficulty comparable to human-created items.

Read at Psychology Today