Booost versus ChatGPT: A Guide for Needs Assessors
It’s been a few years since I worked as a needs assessor, so I never had questions from students about ChatGPT or similar AI tools.
However, I imagine that nowadays quite a few students will mention they've been using ChatGPT to help manage their workload. Or maybe just ask directly – ‘why are you recommending (insert name of other DSA-approved product) when I could just use AI for free?’
And I think it’s a fair question, or at least one that is worth considering. Especially in the light of proposed changes to the DSA funding, which are, to some degree, based on a similar premise.
The actual job of a Needs Assessor
It's worth starting from first principles. The role of a needs assessor isn't to recommend software, it's to help each student find their most effective support. Often, that's DSA-funded specialist software. But sometimes it might be something else – a free tool, a website, a feature the student didn’t know about in Microsoft Word.
The test is always the same: what will actually work for this student, given their specific difficulties and course demands?
That framing matters here because it means this isn't an argument that ChatGPT is bad. For some students, it may genuinely be the right option. The question is which students, and why.
What ChatGPT does well
General-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT are genuinely remarkable. They can help with planning, drafting, breaking down complex tasks, explaining difficult concepts, and restructuring muddled thinking. For a confident, organised user who knows what they need and can articulate it clearly, they are extraordinarily powerful.
And that’s the key – for some users it works. But only for some users.
The blank prompt problem
All general AI tools share the same fundamental design: they wait. The user must initiate every interaction with a request that is clear enough to get a useful response. This places a demand on metacognitive awareness, task clarity, and the ability to articulate a need at the moment you're experiencing it.
For students with executive function challenges, this is often what they find most difficult. The student who is frozen, overwhelmed, and unable to start is also the least equipped to write a prompt that gets them unstuck. The tool that could theoretically help them is at its least accessible at exactly the moment they most need it.
This isn't about the functionality of the tools; it’s a mismatch between how they work and how executive dysfunction often presents in practice. If you are stuck with task paralysis, using a tool that requires you to start with a task is obviously not going to work.
General AI tools also offer no continuity between sessions – no memory of yesterday's plan, no record of what was agreed, no scaffolding to return to when focus breaks. Every conversation starts from scratch. For students who struggle with transitions, that means re-establishing context at every sitting, which is itself a significant cognitive demand. And the open, unstructured nature of a chat interface makes it a reliable source of distraction. The tool that might help a student plan their essay is one context-switch away from something else entirely.
Capability versus effective use
Here is where the comparison often goes wrong. It can be tempting, looking at what, say, Booost does, to think: ChatGPT could do that. And in a narrow technical sense, that may sometimes be true. A sufficiently skilled prompt could replicate some of what Booost provides.
But that's the wrong question. The right question isn't what can ChatGPT do, it's what can this student do with it, reliably, on a difficult Tuesday morning when their motivation is low and their anxiety is high. Is it more effective? Less stressful? Less demanding of already depleted energy?
Which is the assessing bit of needs assessing. A piece of software that is theoretically powerful but practically inaccessible to the student being assessed shouldn’t be what is then recommended.
What Booost (and other specialist software) is designed to do differently
Booost is built around a different assumption: that the student shouldn't have to know what to ask for in order to get support. The structure exists before the student arrives. There is no blank prompt, no open interface, and no requirement to be already functioning well enough to initiate effectively.
For students where executive function, task initiation, or transition difficulties are part of the picture, i.e. for many students within the DSA population, this difference matters. It's not about features. It's about what the tool asks of the user at their most vulnerable moments, and whether that matches what the user can reliably provide.
And Booost is just an example; many other specialist software tools work from the same starting point.
A position assessors can hold with confidence
So, the student who asks why you're recommending Booost over a free AI tool is asking a good question.
The answer isn't that AI tools are bad, or that free means inferior. The answer is that the best recommendation is the one that will work for this person, given how their difficulties actually show up, and not on their best day, but on their toughest. Sometimes that may be ChatGPT. Often it will be something else.
And that’s what good needs assessment has always been – exploring different options, with the student, to find the best solution. The tools change. The principle doesn't.