When the Tutor Is a Model: Learning Gains, Guardrails, and the Quiet Rise of AI Co‑Tutors
Opening — Why this matters now One‑to‑one tutoring is education’s gold standard—and its most stubborn bottleneck. Everyone agrees it works. Almost no one can afford it at scale. Into this gap steps generative AI, loudly promising democratized personalization and quietly raising fears about hallucinations, dependency, and cognitive atrophy. Most debates about AI tutors stall at ideology. This paper does something rarer: it runs an in‑classroom randomized controlled trial and reports what actually happened. No synthetic benchmarks. No speculative productivity math. Just UK teenagers, real maths problems, and an AI model forced to earn its keep under human supervision. fileciteturn0file0 ...