Ninety percent of surveyed US faculty expect AI to weaken students' critical thinking

Daniel Willingham puts the causal story in one line. "Learning happens as a consequence of cognitive processing. Cognitive processing is typically effortful, and that's what AI effectively removes," the cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville said ^[7]. That is testable. Give two groups the same problem, let one use a model, then measure what each can do later without one. Neither of the two surveys in this record did that. One asked faculty what they expect; the other asked students how they feel ^[18].

The student figure is closer to data and is still self-report. About 20% of higher-education students who use AI said they already find it harder to work through problems without it, out of more than 8,000 respondents to a global survey this year ^[6]. The 20% applies to the AI-using subset alone, so if AI users were most of those respondents the number of students reporting that difficulty is on the order of 1,600 ^[16].

Willingham calls critical thinking "kind of a basket term that captures instances in which people are thinking well" ^[8]. Cognition researchers tend to work with narrower processes instead: memory, reasoning, decision-making and problem-solving, which use differing but overlapping brain mechanisms ^[9]. Practising critical thinking also requires knowledge of the relevant domain, and one study found that neurologists are not particularly good at diagnosing cardiology cases ^[10].

In 1983, a report by the US National Commission on Excellence in Education warned that many 17-year-olds lacked "the 'higher order' intellectual skills we should expect of them" ^[11]. The report came 42 years before the faculty survey ^[15].

"There is a risk that students outsource precisely the activities through which scientific thinking develops: formulating hypotheses, interpreting evidence, considering alternatives and struggling with uncertainty," said Thomas Nygren, who studies education and critical thinking at Uppsala University in Sweden ^[12].

Critical thinking is an educational priority for UNESCO and part of school curricula in almost all OECD countries ^[13], and Stephan Vincent-Lancrin, who led a ten-year programme on critical thinking at the OECD in Paris, said "The building of critical thinking and higher-order thinking skills have become even more important" ^[14]. Yan, whose Codex build showed him that the AI could work through his course "without the learner being intellectually engaged" at all, said teaching students to reason and think for themselves "is more critical than ever" ^[3][4].