When students use chatbots without guidance, the AI tends to do the work for them, short‑circuiting the effort that produces learning. In a high‑school experiment in Turkey, students given GPT‑4 for homework without scaffolding scored 17% worse on the final exam than peers. With teacher guidance and pedagogical prompting, however, AI tutoring can improve outcomes.
— This pushes schools and ed‑tech to design AI that enforces learning scaffolds rather than answer‑giving, shaping policy, curricula, and product defaults.
msmash
2025.10.16
78% relevant
South Korea’s AI textbooks were scrapped after teachers and students reported inaccuracies and workload burdens, paralleling evidence that unguided AI assistance can undermine learning; both show AI inserted without strong pedagogy and scaffolding can backfire.
Sara Atske
2025.10.08
68% relevant
The Pew finding that about 25% of U.S. teens now use ChatGPT for schoolwork—double since 2023—raises the stakes of evidence showing unguided AI use can reduce learning, strengthening the case for scaffolding and classroom guardrails.
Arnold Kling
2025.10.01
60% relevant
The CS professor argues students 'cheat themselves' by using AI to short‑circuit assignments—aligning with evidence that unguided AI use hurts learning—while Kling pushes back, highlighting the active debate over AI’s role in education.
Greg Easley
2025.09.25
66% relevant
The author notes students often use generative AI 'to reduce or even eliminate the effort required to learn' (citing an Aug 2025 Inside Higher Ed survey showing 85% usage) and argues for designs that start from a learner’s capacity and build adaptive effort, echoing evidence that unguided AI help undermines learning while scaffolded use can help.
Derek Thompson
2025.09.22
80% relevant
The article’s core claim—that widespread, unguided reliance on AI will erode students’ and workers’ capacity for deep thinking—tracks directly with evidence that giving students GPT‑4 for homework without scaffolding led to worse final‑exam scores. It places that empirical result inside a broader cultural frame of AI‑induced deskilling.
Ethan Mollick
2025.07.07
100% relevant
Penn researchers’ Turkey high‑school RCT (−17% exam scores with unguided GPT‑4) and the clarification of the MIT 'Your Brain on ChatGPT' EEG study’s limits.