The end of students doing their own reading is not all that nigh, but AI can change the way they do it.
The CRADLE team at Deakin U keeps calm and carries on with ways for teachers to work with students to use artificial intelligence.
Last year Thomas Corbin and colleagues set out a strategy for academics to accept AI is inevitable and work with it, rather than try but fail to stop student use (FC HERE).
Now Dr Corbin, with colleagues from Deakin U and other universities, reports on how UGs are using AI to change, not replace, the way they read course texts by asking 24 in “semi-structured interviews.”
The researchers chose philosophy students, due to “due to the complexity, density, and interpretive demands of philosophical texts.”
What they found does not suit the doomsayer narrative that students use Gen AI to subcontract study from reading through thinking to writing:
- Students use AI “to help manage academic workload under time pressure,” when they have not done the reading for a class, or when (in FC’s words not the authors), they can’t be fagged.
- It helps with “unfamiliar vocabulary, dense prose and historic language.” And some of the students took some scaring, one student said Hobbes was no problem.
- They use it as a brief on the text that they also read for themselves, “reducing the need for multiple full readings and increasing the efficiency of comprehension”
- They compared their understanding of a text with what AI stated it meant
- But they did not accept everything AI told them.
“For many students, this reflective engagement was part of a broader epistemic strategy, not simply trusting the AI output but comparing, triangulating, and learning through alignment or contrast with their own interpretations” Corbin and colleagues state.
Which sounds to AI rather like the critical thinking the HASS establishment assures us their courses teach.
The depressing take-out: “yes, students sometimes substitute AI summaries for reading, rushing through reading assignments and avoiding difficult texts.”
The optimistic one: “the student who uses AI to translate philosophical jargon is not taking a shortcut but rather building a bridge. Similarly, the student who cross-checks their understanding against AI interpretations isn't avoiding intellectual work but rather adding a layer of metacognitive reflection.”