My students can’t read. It is the title of the opinion column in which Tyler Jagtuniversity literature professor, narrates the situation currently found in his classrooms. Many students are not able to read or maintain the plot of a 20-page text. He believes that AI and mobile phones are to blame.
20 pages is too much. This teacher says that he has been assigning the same task to his rhetoric and writing students for five years: reading a 20-page article. However, this year none of his students finished the work and they were not repeaters, but rather university students who had passed the entrance exams. One of them was honest and admitted that the text was too long and “constantly missed the point of the article.”
Jagt acknowledges that the complaint that students do not know how to read is common among teachers, but according to him this time things are serious and there is data that corroborates it.
The tests. According to the results of the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), students in grade 12 (equivalent to a 2nd year of Baccalaureate in Spain) obtained the lowest score on the reading test since the assessment began in 1992. A third of the participants reached the basic level, which means that they are likely not able to “draw general conclusions based on concepts explicitly presented in a text.” Younger students are even worse off. According to a study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation70% of fourth grade students (like fourth grade) are not able to read fluently.
That is in the United States, but in Spain the situation is not ideal either. According to the OECDat least a third of the Spanish population has level 1 reading comprehension, which means that “they can only understand very short texts with a minimum of distracting information.” A report from the BBVA Foundation and the Valencian Institute of Economic Research (Ivie)Spaniards between 25 and 34 years old, who have studied more than their parents, advance much more slowly in basic skills.
It’s technology’s fault. Or at least that is what the author maintains, specifically the emergence of smartphones and, more recently, AI. The idea that technology makes us stupid has been accompanying us for decades and with the emergence of AI, technological panic has intensified.
That students are using AI to do their jobs is something we already knew. What is still not clear is what consequences it can have on a cognitive level. There is no evidence that technology produces cognitive damage (yes changes), but it is also true that until now we have not had a technology capable of doing everything that AI does.
Debt and cognitive surrender. They are two concepts that emerged from recent studies. The first, cognitive debtcomes from a MIT research titled “Your brain on ChatGPT”. Participants who used ChatGPT had the worst brain performance when completing a task that involved writing essays. The researchers conclude that using AI as a complete substitute for mental effort can weaken our neural connections.
The idea of cognitive surrender is mentioned in a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania. According to researchers, cognitive surrender arises when we delegate our thinking to AI and accept its answers too confidently. Another study from the University of Oxford saw how If we use AI and then it is taken away from us, our performance worsens.
not so fast. There is an important nuance and that is that the concept of “using AI” is very varied. We can use it without checking the answers and accepting everything it tells us or we can use it as a tool in our creative process. In fact, in several of these studies, participants who used AI as support obtained scores very similar to those of the group that did not use AI. Therefore it is not whether we use it or not, it is how we use it.
However, the arguments in favor of using AI in educational environments are becoming fewer and fewer. There was a study that said using chatbots like ChatGPT had a positive impact on learning, but was recently withdrawn due to “concerns regarding discrepancies”. Come on, the biggest argument of the defenders of educational AI went down the drain.
The other culprit. As we said, this professor also points to smartphones as responsible for this situation. Appointment a 2017 study in which they verified how the simple presence of the mobile phone reduced the “available cognitive capacity”. He also cites another 2022 study in which they saw that reading on a smartphone was associated with prefrontal overload and decreased concentration.
Tiktokize the school. The problem is not cell phones, but social networks and doomscrolling that hijacks our attention. We have become accustomed to consuming pills of information in the form of tweets, posts, reels and tiktoks. In this context, a 20-page text is much, much. Tyler Jagt is adapting to this reality by dividing work into two, so they have to read less, and assigning specific tasks so they don’t lose track as much.
Image | Siora Photography in Unsplash
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