Is AI making us stupid?

 ​Just sharing:  You probably know Cal Newport ("Deep Work").  Here's a short excerpt of an interview where he's talking about AI and students (he teaches at Georgetown).  Seems wise.  I really like the "10,000 steps" metaphor.  

 Is Artificial Intelligence Eroding Our Ability to Think?

In this Chronicle of Higher Education interview with Evan Goldstein, Cal Newport (Georgetown University) talks about his worry that artificial intelligence is making us stupid. Some excerpts:

“When AI automates tasks that are repetitive or time-consuming,” says Newport, “or that you would be willing to hand off to a research assistant, I’m not so concerned. If a political scientist can use an AI coding agent to do a more comprehensive and faster data analysis to help them form an argument, that’s good.”

But he sees many students using AI to automate thought. “Think about having to write something and facing a blank screen. Blank-screen writing is hard. You might want to avoid that cognitive strain. You can get a good enough draft from AI and maybe edit it. You are spared cognitive strain. That worries me because cognitive strain is at the core of the entire post-Paleolithic human experience. It’s at the core of all big ideas. It’s at the core of empathy, morality, ethics, notions of justice and human rights, and religion and philosophy… Yes, automate drudgery. But automating hard thought is a dangerous direction to go.” 

The combination of distracting social media and artificial intelligence “is a powerful one-two punch,” says Newport. “This is a problem that’s 15 years in the making. The smartphone revolution and social media kicked this off. Now here comes AI at the worst time from the perspective of human thinking.”

“We need to think about cognitive fitness the way we think about physical fitness,” he continues. “There should be a simple rule for being a thinker in an age of AI: don’t let AI write anything for you. Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health. Write that e-mail from scratch. Write that memo with the bullet points from scratch. Don’t flee the strain. You need it as much as you need those 10,000 steps a day.” 

How about the student experience? “We are going to look much more like classic Oxford than we do today,” says Newport. “More in-person testing, more blue books. Also, more Oxford-style tutorials where you sit with a proctor and walk through an argument and they assess how well you understand the material.” 

“Is AI Making Us Stupid? Cal Newport Is Worried” by Evan Goldstein in The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 27, 2026 (Vol. 72, #15, pp. 24-29)

Frank Bruni - Our Semi-Colons, Ourselves

Getty Images - from the original article

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From NYT - Bruni - Our Semi-Colons, Ourselves 

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I suppose so. But it could have come across a whole lot better, and that’s one of the arguments for writing well — for taking the time and summoning the focus to do so. Good writing burnishes your message. It burnishes the messenger, too.

You may be dazzling on your feet, an extemporaneous ace, thanks to the brilliant thoughts that pinball around your brain. There will nonetheless be times when you must pin them down and put them in a long email. Or a medium-length email. Or a memo. Or, hell, a Slack channel. The clarity, coherence, precision and even verve with which you do that — achieving a polish and personality distinct from most of what A.I. spits out — will have an impact on the recipients of that missive, coloring their estimation of you and advancing or impeding your goals.

If you’re honest with yourself, you know that, because you know your own skeptical reaction when people send you error-clouded dreck. You also know the way you perk up when they send its shining opposite. And while the epigrammatic cleverness or audiovisual genius of a viral TikTok or Instagram post has the potential to shape opinion and motivate behavior, there are organizations and institutions whose internal communications and decision making aren’t conducted via social media. GIFs, memes and emojis don’t apply.

When my friend Molly Worthen, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a frequent contributor to Times Opinion, took the measure of the influential diplomat Charles Hill for her 2006 book “The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost,” she wrote that a principal reason for his enormous behind-the-scenes influence was his dexterity with the written word. He took great notes. He produced great summaries. He made great arguments — on paper, not just on the fly.

Worthen noted in her book that “transmitting ideas into written words is hard, and people do not like to do it.” As a result, someone who performs that task gladly, quickly and nimbly “in most cases ends up the default author, the quarterback to whom others start to turn, out of habit, for the play.”

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Good writing announces your seriousness, establishing you as someone capable of caring and discipline. But it’s not just a matter of show: The act of wrestling your thoughts into logical form, distilling them into comprehensible phrases and presenting them as persuasively and accessibly as possible is arguably the best test of those very thoughts. It either exposes them as flawed or affirms their merit and, in the process, sharpens them.

Writing is thinking, but it’s thinking slowed down — stilled — to a point where dimensions and nuances otherwise invisible to you appear. That’s why so many people keep journals. They want more than just a record of what’s happening in their lives. They want to make sense of it.

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But show me someone who writes correctly and ably — and who knows that — and I’ll show you someone who probably also writes more. Such people’s awareness of their agility and their confidence pave the way. Show me someone who has never been pressed to write well or given the tutelage and tools to do so, and I’ll show you someone who more often than not avoids it and, in avoiding it, is deprived of not only its benefits but also its pleasures.

Yes, pleasures. I’ve lost count of the times when I’ve praised a paragraph, sentence or turn of phrase in a student’s paper and that student subsequently let me know that the passage had in fact been a great source of pride, delivering a jolt of excitement upon its creation. We shouldn’t devalue that feeling. We should encourage — and teach — more people to experience it.

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NYT Learning Network: AI and College Essays

 NYT Learning Network: AI and College Essays

Hidden Expectations of College Application Essays - from Marshall Memo 998 8/14/2023

 Hidden Expectations of College Application Essays

In this American Journal of Education article, Sarah Beck (New York University) and

Amanda Godley (University of Pittsburgh) say the decision by many colleges to make SAT

and ACT scores optional, along with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on race-based

affirmative action, have made the application essay more important than ever. “The pressure is

on college applicants,” say Beck and Godley, “to illustrate the kinds of nonacademic factors

increasingly prized in applicants – namely, attitude – and so-called performance factors such as

teamwork, leadership, grit, and motivation.”

Beck and Godley analyzed college essays that were identified as exemplary by college

admissions staffers at four highly selective U.S. colleges, and also studied the advice given by

several groups to students writing college essays. Some common themes from the latter:

- Convey your identity, personality, uniqueness, values, thoughts.

- Present a unique topic.

- Reflect your maturity, introspection, grit, drive, curiosity.

- Provide new information (not a repeat of other parts of the application).

- Stick with the same main idea throughout.

- Give details, “show don’t tell,” be concise, don’t use clichés.

- Don’t be formal, but be clear and proofread your essay.

- Use your “voice and style.”

- Stand out from others.

- Demonstrate that you are a good, creative writer.

- Show how you will fit at this school and contribute to the community.

Beck and Godley believe the college essay is a unique genre that most high-school

students have not had exposure to. “Given the lack of alignment between the college

application essay genre and traditional school-assignment genres,” say the authors, “we are

concerned that emphasis on these essays for admissions decisions may continue to

disadvantage first-generation, racially and linguistically minoritized, and low-income students

in underresourced schools. Students with access to extra financial and human resources

increasingly receive the additional guidance needed to discern the hidden expectation of this

genre, whereas those with fewer resources do not.”

Beck and Godley identified a number of characteristics in the 20 highly-rated college

essays they analyzed, including:

- The use of an extended metaphor – for example, a tortilla, a Greek island, a bridge, a

pickle truck, Chuck Taylor shoes;

- Presenting themselves as good creative writers with maturity, introspection, grit, drive,

and curiosity;

- Standing out from the crowd, frequently indicated by the applicant’s cultural

background – “I am Puerto Rican and Irish and French and Polish and all these

backgrounds have allowed me to see unique perspectives.”

- A niche interest – Legos, music, fly-fishing, rock-climbing, nanomedicine, farming,

potatoes, soccer, creative writing;

- Presenting themselves as “authentic, distinctive, and a suitable fit for membership in

the community;”

- Exemplary essays avoided direct self-appraisal, instead referring to the reactions of

others: “My climbing partners say that I take the most unorthodox routes when

climbing, but ironically they’re the most natural and comfortable paths for me.”

- Including micronarratives – short, embedded stories – and vivid imagery;

- Mixing exposition and narrative in effective ways.

“This structure,” say Beck and Godley, referring to the last item on the list above, “illuminated

one of the ways in which the genre of college admissions essays is quite different from the

genres of essays typically taught in schools – such as literacy analysis, persuasion, and

personal narrative – and why this genre can be particularly confusing for students who do not

have access to expert guidance in the essay-writing process.”

Beck and Godley have these pointers for teachers, counselors, and parents preparing

students to write effective college essays:

• Expose students to literary journalistic essays (such as those in The New Yorker) that

combine personal narrative, persuasion through compelling example, and scientific findings on

data in novel ways that bring issues and ideas to life for readers. “Studying and emulating

multiple examples of such published essays,” they say, “is one approach that teachers and

counselors could take to provide support for students writing the new and unfamiliar genre of

college admissions essays.”

• Explicitly discuss with students “the aspects of self that admissions offices seem to

value,” giving them agency for the “cultural expectations for the representation and sharing of

the self with unknown readers.”

• The topics, vocabulary, and syntax of successful college essays are a linguistic resource

that can be taught to all students and form an important part of the “tool kit of academic

literacy skills” needed to vault over disadvantages.

• Beck and Godley discussed ChatGPT with college admissions officers and were told

that at least so far, artificial intelligence is incapable of emulating “the compelling personal

voice that distinguishes outstanding essays that improve applicants’ chances for acceptance at

elite colleges.”

“‘What Makes You, You’: The Discursive Construction of the Self in US College Application

Essays” by Sarah Beck and Amanda Godley in American Journal of Education, August 2023

(Vol. 129, #4, p. 539-564); the authors can be reached at sarah.beck@nyu.edu and

VPGodley@pitt.edu .

End of the Take-Home Essay? from Marshall Memo 9/25/2023

 Is This the End of the Take-Home Essay?

In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, political science professor Corey Robin

(Brooklyn College, CUNY) says that at first he wasn’t worried about ChatGPT. The skills it

took for a student to coax a plausible essay out of artificial intelligence, he reasoned, were

similar to those involved in actually writing the essay. “I could rest easy,” thought Robin, “in

the knowledge that, at least, I wasn’t not teaching my students what they needed to learn how

to do.”

But then he explored the second generation of large language models and was alarmed.

He asked his high-school daughter to prompt GPT-4 to write an essay he’d assigned the

previous year. The first draft was competent but lacked a clear thesis and had other flaws. But

when his daughter prompted it to fix those shortcomings, the second draft was impressive.

Further prompts produced an essay that Robin says was “as good as what many of my students

produce after a semester of effort.”

With current technology, all a student has to do to produce high-quality essays is be

able to see the difference between good and not-as-good work and prompt AI to improve

drafts. Even students who struggle academically can do that, says Robin – but it doesn’t mean

they can write a good essay themselves. Now, thanks to large language models, they don’t

have to.

Why do teachers ask students to write essays? he asks. And why do we grade them?

Because writing is a helpful medium for students to explore, inhabit, and make sense of worlds

that may be alien to them. “None of that is easy,” says Robin. “Through requiring students to

write multiple drafts, intensive comments on each draft, ongoing revision, and conversation, I

teach them that all writing is rewriting, and good work is just that: work.”

“Academic writing,” he continues, “has never simply been about producing good

papers. It’s about ordering one’s world, taking the confusion that confronts us and turning it

into something intelligible, wresting coherence from chaos. And knowing that that doesn’t

happen spontaneously or instinctively. That’s not a skill for college only. It’s a life-long

practice. Being able to see a situation, picking out those elements that matter and lend it

significance, bringing clarity to obscurity: these are what good readers and good writers do.

They’re what good friends, good parents, and good citizens do, too.”

In spoken conversation, we can replicate some of these processes, says Robin, but

writing is different. It gets our thoughts down on paper (or on a screen), objectifies them,

freezes them in time, and lets us look at them from a distance, as if they weren’t our own,

allowing us to revise and improve them. “That’s what makes writing, and rewriting, such a

distinctive experience – and opportunity,” he says. “It requires you to make your fleeting

thought a hard fact in the world, and to make yourself answerable for that fact.”

This is hard work, and it doesn’t come naturally to most of us. “It’s effortful,” says

Robin. “It’s frustrating. It’s disappointing. Failure looms large. We need incentives to do it. All

of us are vulnerable to shortcuts and escape hatches.” He describes his own procrastination

strategies: surfing the web, lying on the couch, doing e-mail, looking out the window, doing

everything but the work that needs to be done. His students describe similar evasions.

How do teachers deal with students’ struggles? By helping them break daunting

assignments into smaller parts, develop resilience, know where to get help, push back on their

evasions, become patient with their inadequacies. But teachers also need to set clear

expectations and make good use of deadlines, reminders, and sanctions (often in the form of

grades). Robin believes it’s a fantasy to think that teachers can get students to produce

excellent work solely through charisma, teaching skill, and inspiration.

“There is nothing in the realm of work,” he says, “– no matter how interesting or

exciting or desired – that does not entail, at some point, the experience of frustration, self-

doubt, loneliness, and anxiety. Experiences that most of us (realistically, all of us) flee from,

especially when we’re by ourselves, without the helping hand or reassurance or conversational

ease of another.” The threat of bad grades is not what produces this discomfort in students. It’s

intrinsic to the work, even if teachers are doing everything right. Our goal is not to eliminate

that discomfort but to give students the tools to deal with it.

“But for students to really get that,” Robin continues, “– to believe it, to feel it – they

have to do the work. They have to go through the process in order to learn that they can’t run

from it, or outsource it to AI, and, more important, that they don’t need to run from it.”

Sometimes the shock of a critical comment or a low grade turns things around and gets

students doing the kind of work that leads to discovery, clear thinking, and deep satisfaction. If

students know they get by via GPT-4, will they ever achieve that exalted state of mind?

What is to be done? Should teachers assign take-home essay assignments so artfully

framed that AI can’t psyche them out? Should students’ writing be assessed every step of the

way? Should we resign ourselves to the fact that some students will cheat with AI and that’s

their decision?

None of these feel right to Robin. “We shouldn’t let our fear of being cops prevent us

from being good teachers,” he says. “The issue is not punishment but pedagogy. Unlike

policing, teaching is a two-way street. To throw myself into my students’ work, I need to know

that they’re willing to do the work. But neither of us can know that, for certain, until we’re

doing the work, together. Simply leaving it up to students to decide whether they’re going to

do the work, without further comment or intervention or negative sanction from me, is a failure

of pedagogy.”

His solution? This semester, for the first time in 30 years in the classroom, he won’t

assign take-home essays, instead requiring students to write papers, midterms, and finals in

class. This will cut into the amount of class time used for discussing the texts being read, and it

will eliminate some opportunities for revision that are so important to writing. He’s not sure

how this will work out, but he’s giving it a try. It’s a challenge, an experiment, a draft, up for

revision as they proceed.

“The End of the Take-Home Essay? How ChatGPT Changed My Plans for the Fall” by Corey

Robin in The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15, 2023 (Vol. 70, #2, pp. 34-37);

Robin can be reached at crobin@brooklyn.cuny.edu .

 

Using ChatGPT and Other Bots to Teach Better

            In this SSRN paper, Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) say that in the current debate on the uses and abuses of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs), educators haven’t paid enough attention to some important classroom applications. The authors identify five pedagogical strategies that are not used enough in classrooms because they are time-consuming and hard to implement – and show how the new bots can be helpful:

            • Generating examples to help students understand difficult and abstract concepts – The best way to explain new and challenging material is to give students a number of examples. “If students are presented with only one example,” say Mollick and Mollick, “they may focus on the superficial details of that example and not get at the deeper concept. Multiple examples of a single concept can help students decontextualize the idea from the example, leading to better recall and understanding.” 

Ideally, examples provide a real-world context, anchor abstract ideas in an analogy or story, ground concepts in engaging details, reveal complexity, highlight nuances, help students think critically, and support the transfer of learning to new situations. These demanding criteria show how difficult it is for teachers to generate enough high-quality examples. That’s where the bots come in. All a teacher needs to do is specify the concept, ask for varied examples, and describe the grade level of students and the style of writing required. Click on the full article below for examples on the concept of opportunity costs.

Of course the teacher needs to evaluate the examples generated: Are they factually correct? Are they relevant? Do they have enough detail? Will students find them interesting? Do they connect the abstract to the concrete? Having narrowed down to a good list of examples and presented them to a class, the teacher might then ask students what the examples have in common, have them compare and contrast several, and ask which different aspects of the concept each example highlights. 

            • Providing varied explanations and analogies to address student misconceptions – Clear explanations are central to good teaching, helping students build mental maps and achieve deeper understanding. But good explanations must be built on students’ prior knowledge, take into account likely misconceptions, plan a step-by-step approach with organizational cues so students can follow along, and provide concrete details and analogies. LLMs can tackle these exacting demands, quickly generating explanations and analogies for a specific grade level and level of understanding. See the article link for a suggested explanation of the concept of photosynthesis for elementary students. 

            • Producing low-stakes tests so students can practice retrieving information – Checking for understanding is a proven method of cementing material in long-term memory. But generating high-quality tests, quizzes, and mid-lesson “hinge” questions (to see if students are ready to move on to a new topic) is “an effortful task,” say Mollick and Mollick. LLMs can quickly generate diagnostic retrieval exercises. See the article link for examples of quizzes on U.S. history and high-school biology.

            • Assessing students’ knowledge gaps to guide instructors’ next steps – The best way for teachers to know what to do next is asking students questions like these: 

-   What is the most important idea or concept covered in class today?

-   Why do you think this idea is important?

-   What is the most difficult class concept so far?

-   What did you struggle to understand?

-   What concept or problem would you like to see explored in more detail?

LLMs can be asked to digest students’ responses to questions like these (perhaps in the middle of a class) and quickly generate an analysis of responses. See the article below for key points and areas of confusion on a lesson on BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement). 

            • Creating distributed practice exercises to reinforce learning – “Students need to practice retrieving information not just once but multiple times during a course,” say Mollick and Mollick. It’s also important for students to continuously make connections among the different concepts and skills they’ve learned. But even when students know about the value of distributed practice, they continue to “cram” for tests at the last minute, which means teachers must be intentional about distributing practice. To do so, teachers need to know:

-   What are the most important topics for students to remember?

-   Which connections between topics are critical and should be practiced often?

-   How often and when should students retrieve previously learned material?

-   What is the best spacing of assessments to allow just the right amount of forgetting?

-   When have students had enough practice?

LLMs can be very helpful designing and scheduling quick quizzes spread out over days, weeks, and months, providing an effective way to lodge concepts and skills in students’ long-term memory. See the article link for examples of distributed practice during a unit on the Enlightenment and the American Revolution. 

 

“Using AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including Prompts” by Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick in SSRN, March 17, 2023; the authors can be reached at emollick@wharton.upenn.edu and lmollick@gmail.com. 

How to Use ChatGPT in Class

 From this Edutopia article: "Some ideas for Using ChatGPT in Middle and High School Classes"

SPOT THE COMPUTER ESSAY 

John Warner, blogger for Inside Higher Ed and author of Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, reminds us that these tools are only rearranging words and not applying feeling, heart, or other emotional components; the results lack energy. In a language arts classroom, we might describe such a piece of writing as having a weak “voice.”

For a playful exercise, share two or three pieces of human writing from the past year or two and slip in an example from ChatGPT, and have students discuss what makes these examples human—or decidedly not. Nuance, passion, and, perhaps, even fallibility will be clues that students can investigate.

USE PRIMARY SOURCES AND FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNTS 

My colleague Joy Xu in the English department asks students to interview someone and connect this person’s experience to a text. First of all, the narrative/expository combination provides more points of entry for student writing.

Second, this synthesis ensures that no machine prompt can provide language to express new learning.

COMPARE TWO READINGS 

Peter Greene, a senior writer for Forbes magazine and a high school English teacher of nearly 40 years, suggests that we require students “to compare and contrast a pair of literary works (provided the comparison is not a time-worn one).”

Students will create unique essays that demonstrate their learning, the connections they’ve made, and the meaning. Again, because these AI tools are trained on what can be found on the internet, the rarer the story, the rarer the computer-generated analysis.

EXPECT CLASSROOM DISCUSSION TO BE USED AS A RESOURCE 

This idea, loosely based on another Peter Greene suggestion, considers a key component of what he calls “authentic writing” class discussions. He recommends that the discussion “[become] one of the texts being considered.”

A rather positive result that would likely emerge from this idea would be students paying closer attention during classroom conversations. Dare I say they may even take notes?

ChatGPT: What to do what it happens?

 From Edweek article by Alyson Klein: link

1. Make your expectations very clear

Students need to know what exactly constitutes cheating, whether AI tools are involved or not.“Every school or district needs to put stakes in the ground [on a] policy around academic dishonesty, and what that means specifically,” said Michelle Brown, the founder and CEO of CommonLit. Schools can decide how much or how little students can rely on AI to make cosmetic changes or do research, she said, and should make that clear to students. She recommended “the heart of the policy [be] about allowing students to do intellectually rigorous work.”

2. Talk to students about AI in general and ChatGPT in particular

If it appears a student may have passed off ChatGPT’s work as their own, sit down with them one on one, CommonLit and Quill recommend. Then talk about the tool and AI in general. Questions could include: Have you heard of ChatGPT? What are other students saying about it? What do you think it should be used for? Discuss the promises—and potential pitfalls—of artificial intelligence.

3. If students use ChatGPT for an assignment, they must attribute what material they used from it

If students are allowed to use ChatGPT or another AI tool for research or other help, let them know how and why they should credit that information, Brown said. Since users can’t link back to a ChatGPT response, she suggested students share the prompt they used to generate the information in their citation.

4. Ask students directly if they used ChatGPT

If students say “yes,” Romoslawski likes to get a sense of why. “More often than not, the student was just struggling on the assignment. They had a roadblock. They didn’t know what to do,” he said. “They were crunched for time, because we’re a high-achieving high school and our students are taking some pretty rigorous courses. This was their third homework assignment of the night and they just wanted to get through it.”

5. Don’t rely on ChatGPT detectors alone to determine if there was cheating

There are a number of tools—including one from OpenAI, ChatGPT’s developer—that purport to be able to distinguish an AI-crafted story or essay from one written by a human. But most of these detectors don’t publish their accuracy rates. And those that do are ineffective about 10 to 20 percent of the time.

6. Make it clear why learning to write on your own is important

Students in general, and particularly students who take advantage of AI to cheat, need to understand what they are missing out on when they take a technology-enabled shortcut. Educators should try to persuade students that learning to write on their own will help them reason and think, or be critical to future job success, Gault said.

But others will need a more immediate incentive. The strongest argument one teacher came up with, according to Quill’s Gault? Tell students that learning to write will make them more persuasive, and therefore, “you can convince your parents to do what you want.”