When I walk into my phone-free science class, I turn left and right and still see phones ranging from lightning cables to USB-Cs to Androids being used during quizzes and assignments.
And while these devices may all be unique in their own ways, the one thing they all have in common is what’s displayed on their screens. And that was AI.
As Artificial Intelligence floods through classrooms, students’ excessive use of it has led them to fall behind academically.
Every day, I see students struggle to answer standardized questions as simple as basic addition in geometry or what a “mol” stands for in chemistry.
And because they don’t want to present the incorrect answer, students rely on AI tools as the root of their solutions.
While some people believe these aren’t “real problems” there are reasons to believe that they are.
If students solely depend on AI tools to navigate through the rest of their high school careers, it will lead to severe academic fallouts.
Recent research from the Newsroom College board says 84% of high school students use AI tools to accommodate their school assignments. Whether that’s to brainstorm ideas, revise essays or conduct research sources, AI is the mask behind it all.
Classrooms were designed to be a place where students leave with a take away. But in today’s society, AI has taken away the educational part of school.
Students continue to choose AI over learning the material for themselves. Their priority is centered around completing assignments and not comprehending them.
A study from the National Library of Medicine says, “Recent studies have begun to shed light on how generative AI may affect human cognition, mainly through its effects on learning performance outcomes.”
College students conducted experiments to explore the effects of generative AI versus without its use in essay writing. And to be shown, the generative group indicated that their perceptions on the task were affecting the brain.
ChatGPT, in particular, is the main GenAI tool of choice for high school students.
This platform gives students the easy way out of completing assignments and takes away from their true ability to comprehend.
With ChatGPT’s rise in popularity, teachers will no longer have a purpose to carry in school grounds if what they teach continues to be overlooked by students.
As we live during AI’s peak usage, I hope that it disintegrates from classrooms and students will want to learn the material given to them without complete AI reliance.
