Earlier in the spring, I wrote on how important handwriting information is, especially in the age of artificial intelligence that we find ourselves in. The article is titled, “Striking the Balance: The Role of Handwriting in a Tech-Driven Classroom.” In the article, it detailed some important conclusions about handwriting, like how it is essential to developing literacy skills, helps develop memory, and leads to better letter recognition. These are the fundamentals of reading and thinking, and as an English teacher, I appreciate this so much!
Recently, the AI organization Anthropic completed a study about how college students are using AI in their work. Anthropic is best known for their Chat-GPT competitor, which is called Claude. Sadly, the study found that students are using Claude to do a lot of their higher-level thinking for them. As measured by Bloom’s Taxonomy, Claude was used most for the higher-order thinking skills of analyzing and creating, and it was used less for simple memorization or understanding tasks.
What does this mean for us? As a school, we can assign students tasks that require this type of higher-level thinking. Even now, I can hear the science project of one student who created his own Lego movie to demonstrate comprehension of the different levels of the atmosphere…with no help from AI! I am immensely proud of the quality of our students’ creativity, and I love to see their analysis skills as well. Let’s avoid the “cognitive laziness” that AI can enable in all of us and do the hard, rewarding work of thinking.
