The advent of easily accessible AI tools carries with it potentially big shifts for many established systems, especially in learning environments. As students, educators, and anyone trying to gain knowledge grapple with how to use these new tools, Stanford researchers weigh in on a critical question: How should AI be implemented in pedagogical settings, and what will its effects be on learning?
Chief among the concerns is the issue of cognitive offloading: the act of reducing the mental processing requirements of a task through using different tools. A classic example of cognitive offloading is the use of calculators, which reduce mental effort by solving mathematical equations for us. Even counting with your fingers is an instance of cognitive offloading.
This process, researchers say, isn’t inherently problematic. For some tedious tasks, cognitive offloading enables people to work more efficiently and focus on more important aspects of an endeavor. The difference with AI, researchers say, is that it has the ability to offload an entire job.
“If I can completely delegate a task to AI and I never spend time thinking about it, then there’s no learning,” said Guilherme Lichand, an assistant professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education.
Even if we aren’t delegating to that extreme, the researchers warn that we have to carefully consider which mental processes and skills are being offloaded. Offloading deeply cognitive processes to AI, things like creative problem solving and active learning, can reduce a person’s ability to complete tasks when they lose access to those AI tools. Research also shows that a student’s self-perceptions of creative ability and learning resilience can be reduced by offloading learning tasks.
“We’re still learning about how AI impacts students and educators,” said Lily Fesler, a senior research associate at the AI Hub for Education within Stanford’s SCALE Initiative. “What we’ve learned so far is that it has the potential to both improve and harm learning outcomes. The difference likely comes down to the type of tool that’s being used.”
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Fesler and her team have seen a similar pattern in the broader research landscape. They reviewed over 800 papers on AI in education and focused on 20 high-quality causal studies. While the research is limited, the studies so far seem to agree with what Lichand and Allums found.
“We definitely see that cognitive offloading can be a problem,” Fesler said. “There was one study that showed that students who used a generative AI tool to learn new information showed lower recall and lower brain activity than learners who weren’t using a generative AI tool.”
The review found that the most detrimental tools were general-purpose chatbots. When students used one to study for an exam, it had the potential to decrease their test scores once they no longer had access.
