Artificial intelligence has rapidly developed within classrooms worldwide, reshaping how teachers teach lessons and how students complete assignments.
Recently, AI has made a big impact on education in both positive and negative ways. It can provide quick and personalized feedback and help explain complex ideas, but it also challenges academic integrity when students use it to generate entire essays. This begins to erase the need for critical thinking and puts learning on the back burner.
Advocates say AI offers personalized learning that adapts to students’ strengths and weaknesses, giving quick feedback on assignments and offering ways to improve in specific areas. For teachers, it can grade assignments and lighten the workload of lesson planning while also breaking language barriers between teachers and students.
“I’ve used an AI website when I had a student who only spoke Spanish, so it helped me to translate lessons for her,” high school English teacher Christina Staker said.
Though there are positives, school staff argue the same technology can be used to generate entire essays and solve assignments with no effort, challenging academic integrity by removing the learning process from education. Since AI can write papers, solve assignments and comprehend information for students, teachers express their concerns about how it has begun to hinder students’ critical thinking skills.
“I am concerned that it’s a threat to English education specifically because there is that ability for AI to just write a full-fledged paper for you,” Staker said. “I do have that concern that students are going to slowly forget how to think critically, form their own argument or even just feel passionate about a topic and want to share their ideas about it because it’s so easy for a computer to do it for them.”
Some researchers warn that overuse of AI programs can reduce students’ ability to think creatively, wiring the brain to rely on surface-level ideas provided by these tools. While these programs can efficiently complete tasks in the short term, they may limit students’ ability to think differently and creatively over time.
“If AI is overused, then students aren’t using the processes to create their own original ideas,” sophomore Amanda Pham said. “If they use it too much, it can cause overreliance since they’re not actively learning the material.”
As AI tools become more accessible to the general public, their use in education becomes more and more prominent. This raises questions about the learning outcomes for students. For instance, if they rely heavily on AI to complete assignments, they may have fewer opportunities to practice the skills taught in class, which could affect their ability to apply those skills independently in the future.
“[Students] need to learn to manage AI and negotiate it, and that goes way beyond using it as a crutch to write your papers,” English Department Chair Kimberly Reese said.
As schools continue adapting to AI, educators agree that its integration will depend on whether it is used as a tool for learning or a shortcut around it.
A student uses ChatGPT to generate an essay. This represents how some students exploit AI to avoid completing their own work.
