From the source
Perplexity's guide sets out five research-backed ways students can use AI to study, arguing that how a chatbot is used matters more than the tool itself.
- The methods are retrieval practice, distributed practice, self-explanation, interleaving and metacognitive review, each paired with a workflow, copy-ready prompts and an independent check done with the chat closed.
- Perplexity cites a 2025 randomized field experiment in PNAS (Bastani et al.) with roughly 1,000 high-school math students across four practice sessions: grades rose 48% with standard GPT-4 access and 127% with a guardrailed tutor that gave hints instead of full solutions.
- When access was removed, the standard-access group scored 17% lower than students who had never used AI at all, which Perplexity attributes to outsourced reasoning rather than practiced reasoning.
- A separate review pooling 35 studies and 4,193 participants found students who studied with AI learned moderately more on average, with results varying by subject, duration and manner of use.
- Perplexity notes the PNAS percentages come from high-school math and should not be generalized to other subjects or age groups.