#cognitive offloading

cognitive offloading

2 papers

A teacher prompts a diverse group of secondary students to reason with question cards while an unused answer-generating tablet rests at the edge of the table

Conference Paper2026

Students' essays supported a scaffold-don't-substitute principle, but not a causal harm estimate

Lucile Favero, Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Tanja Käser, Nuria Oliver

ACM AI Leadership Summit

Favero and colleagues organize educational AI risks across cognition, agency, emotional wellbeing, and ethics, then examine 49 International Baccalaureate essays. Eighty percent described reduced thinking through AI reliance, while students preferred tools that prompt recall and reflection rather than supply immediate solutions. The sample is exploratory and self-reported, so it motivates a design principle, not a prevalence or causal claim.

AI scaffoldingcognitive offloadinglearner agency

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A university student compares an AI explanation with handwritten concept notes while an instructor and peers work in a seminar room

Journal Paper2026

Journal Paper 50

Experimental evidence on the learning impact of generative AI: gains persisted when students used it for explanation rather than automation

Zara Contractor, Germán Reyes

arXiv working paper

A randomized, proctored experiment reported that undergraduate access to off-the-shelf generative AI raised immediate factual and conceptual test performance by 0.27 standard deviations and that the gains persisted one week later. The working paper also finds a consequential usage pattern: students who used AI to explain concepts showed stronger delayed gains than students who used it to automate drafting.

generative AIrandomized experimenthigher education

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