cognitive offloading

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.