Decide what you want help with
An AI tutor can produce a complete solution faster than you can work through the question. That can be convenient when you want to check an answer. When you’re trying to learn the method, decide which part of the work you want to keep for yourself before asking.
Perhaps you don’t understand a term, can’t choose an equation, or have reached a result that seems impossible. Each is a different request. ‘I used this equation because ___. Is that choice appropriate?’ gives you a chance to examine your decision. ‘Solve this’ may leave you reading a decision that someone else has already made.
Separate finishing the task from learning to do it
A 2025 study by Hamsa Bastani and colleagues tested two GPT-based tools with nearly 1,000 high-school students in Turkey. Both helped students during supported maths practice. When access was removed, students who had used the basic chat tool performed worse than the control group. A tutor designed to offer guidance with safeguards avoided that harm, but didn’t significantly improve unassisted exam performance over the control group.
This was one setting, subject and implementation, and it wasn’t a study of NovaLearn. Its useful warning is about what we measure: doing well while help is available doesn’t, on its own, show that you can do the work without it. Build an independent attempt into your own routine.
Show the point where your reasoning stops
Write what you understand and make an attempt before requesting a full explanation. If you’re completely new to the topic, ask for a short introduction and a worked example first. You don’t need to struggle with material you have never been taught.
Once you have a starting point, make the request precise. For a calculation: ‘I have converted centimetres to metres, but I am unsure which area to use. Give me a hint about that choice.’ For an essay: ‘Here is my claim and evidence. Which part of the connection have I left unexplained?’
You can ask the tutor to stop after one hint, or to ask one question before continuing. Read the response, do the next piece of work yourself, and then compare. The conversation should contain your reasoning as well as the tutor’s.
Ask for an explanation you can inspect
If the first explanation is unclear, identify the sentence that lost you. Ask for an example, a definition or a slower account of the transition between two steps. A useful follow-up might be: ‘Why does that conclusion follow from the data? Show me which values support it.’
Check important claims against your lesson, textbook or official course materials. If the tutor cites a source, open it and check that it actually supports the claim. Confident wording and a link aren’t substitutes for evidence.
Challenge feedback that appears to contradict your work, and involve your teacher where the interpretation or marking remains unclear. You’re allowed to ask the tool to justify itself. You shouldn’t have to accept a verdict simply because it arrived quickly.
Close the conversation for the final attempt
After working through the difficulty, put the chat out of view. Explain the method in your own words, then try a related question. If you need to reopen the explanation at the same point, you have found the part that still needs attention.
Use that information to narrow the next request. Instead of asking for the whole solution again, ask about the exact decision you could not make independently. Return to a fresh question later, when the previous answer is no longer sitting in your short-term memory.
Choose the NovaTutor mode that fits the task
NovaTutor’s ‘Nova teaches you’ mode introduces material and checks understanding along the way. ‘You explain it back’ asks you to take the lead. Both support typed or voice conversations. Within Lessons, the Explanation stage checks your understanding of that lesson, and Testing provides a separate question-based attempt.
Those tools give you several ways to study. Use the one that fits the gap you have identified, and judge the session by what you can do afterwards. A useful conversation should leave you with more than a well-written answer to copy.