Edu-Snippets
GenAI and the offloading of critical thinking; the attentiveness contagion; how elaborative interrogation improves reading comprehension.
Highlights
Too much trust in AI can reduce critical thinking, shifting the learner’s focus to one of verifying and integrating AI’s output.
Attention can be contagious! Students who sit near an attentive peer become more attentive themselves.
Comprehension of difficult texts can be significantly improved through a simple “why” questioning strategy.
Do people offload critical thinking tasks on Generative AI?
At the recent CHI 2025 conference in Japan, a group of researchers presented the results of a fascinating survey concerning the use of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies. The survey asked 319 knowledge workers to share their experiences using GenAI in a variety of work tasks. The study focused on two research questions:
When and how do knowledge workers perceive themselves engaging in critical thinking while using GenAI?
When and why does GenAI increase or decrease the effort required for critical thinking?
The results suggest the following:
People who have more confidence in GenAI than in their own abilities tend to do less critical thinking. They offload critical thinking to the AI.
People who have more confidence in their own abilities than in GenAI tend to do more critical thinking themselves.
In general, the presence of GenAI causes people to spend more of their time: i) verifying the AI output (information verification); figuring out how the AI’s responses can be applied to their work (response integration); and overseeing the tasks given to AI (task stewardship).
The article doesn’t directly comment on the implications for education, but some findings raise concerns. Students, like knowledge workers, may be tempted to offload high-level thinking operations to AI. The study suggests the less knowledgeable a person is in a field, the less critically engaged they are. There is a risk that students may come to view AI as an easy means of avoiding cognitive struggle. Over the long term, an over-reliance on GenAI may diminish student ability to think independently, or persist with tasks that are intellectually demanding.
Does attentiveness / inattentiveness spread from one student to another?
A fascinating study by Forrin et al. (2021) suggests that attentiveness among learners can be contagious. The researchers conducted a series of experiments in which pairs of students watched a video lecture. One of these students was a confederate who had been pre-trained by the researchers to exhibit either attentive or inattentive behaviour. During the playing of the video, confederates were seated slightly ahead of the subjects so they were within the subjects’ view. Attentive confederates were told to focus their attention on the video, learn forward, and take notes. Inattentive confederates were told to slouch more in their chair, periodically shift their gaze away from the video (e.g., glance at the clock), and take fewer notes. Both types of confederates were trained to avoid any kind of visually distracting sounds (e.g., tapping, yawning) or movements (e.g., shifting their position in the chair).
Following the video, the subjects who had an attentive confederate sitting in front of them had better memory of the lecture and higher self-reported levels of personal attentiveness. During the video, they behaved more attentively and took more notes. In contrast, subjects who had an inattentive confederate in front of them performed more poorly in these respects.
While the results are not terribly surprising, it is interesting that even subtle forms of attention / inattention can be passed from one student to another. The authors refer to this as an attention contagion, likening the spread of attentive or inattentive behaviours to the way a virus or disease spreads.
Importantly, the authors emphasize that inattentiveness should not be confused with distraction. They argue that study participants were not distracted by the confederates, but rather that their own attentiveness began to mirror that of their neighbours. Consciously or unconsciously, people can be influenced by the moods and attitudes of other group members (e.g., “the people around me don’t seem to think this lecture is very important”). Subtle social cues can shape a person’s perception of what’s worth focusing on, and people are not always aware of these influences.
For more on this topic, check out some great articles written by Blake Harvard in his newsletter, The Effortful Educator. Blake’s newsletter does a wonderful job summarizing this research, as does his new book, Do I Have Your Attention?
How can elaborative interrogation be used to improve reading comprehension?
Elaborative interrogation is an active learning strategy in which learners are prompted to answer “how” and “why” questions about material they are studying. For example, a student studying Hamlet might ask themselves, “Why does Hamlet contemplate the nature of existence?” In attempting to generate an explanation, the learner links the new fact or concept to their prior understanding, making the new fact more memorable.
Interestingly, students need not generate correct responses for elaborative interrogation to be of value. Rather, it’s the process of generating an explanation that forges the deeper links and makes material more memorable. Even if teachers need to later correct student misconceptions, the effort invested in generating an explanation is still a productive step toward deeper comprehension.
A key study of elaborative interrogation was conducted on first-year science students by three Maryland researchers. In their comparative study, 294 college students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the experimental condition, students were asked to read a challenging passage from one of their science texts. After each 150 words or so, they were asked a simple “Why” statement about the contents they had just read. The students in the control condition were given the same task, but they were prompted to reread the text after each 150 words.
Students in the elaborative interrogation condition were found to have a significantly better comprehension and lasting recall of the material. Continually prompting students to make sense of new ideas produced deeper understanding and greater retention.
Elaborative interrogation is a simple technique that can be used across many subjects, such as history, science, literature, math, and so on. For educators who wish to use elaborative interrogation, there are a few caveats to keep in mind:
Elaborative interrogation works best when students have established some prior knowledge about the subject. Otherwise, they’ll flounder when asked to generate a response to a “why” question, leading to frustration, guessing and nonsensical explanations.
Incorrect student explanations, if not corrected, can lead to misconceptions. When using elaborative interrogation, listen carefully to student responses and guide them toward stronger answers, if necessary.
If students are presented with too many “why” or “how” questions at once, they may find it cognitively overwhelming. It’s best to start with just one or two questions.
References
Forrin, N. D., Huynh, A. C., Smith, A. C., Cyr, E. N., McLean, D. B., Siklos-Whillans, J., Risko, E. F., Smilek, D., & MacLeod, C. M. (2021). Attention spreads between students in a learning environment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 27(2), 276–291. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000341
Lee, H., Sarkar, A.,Tankelevitch, L., Drosos, I., Rintel, S., Banks, R., & Wilson, N. (2025). The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), April 26–May 01, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
Smith, B. L., Holliday, W. G., & Austin, H. W. (2010). Students' comprehension of science textbooks using a question-based reading strategy. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 47(4), 363–379. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.20378
Strongly relating with the first section on critical thinking on AI use.
On a recent saturday, my team (learning designers) planned an AI toolkit upgradation session. We had been using AI avidly since over a year and the intention was to evolve how we integrate AI into our learning design process, based on recent advancements and newly launched tools.
However, the session soon pivoted and we ended up talking about the joylessness of using AI for over 2 hours. How the sense of accomplishment was lesser. How the work was more. How looking at each version critically was so much more draining that working on it ourselves. As experts, eventually you end up changing most of what AI gives as the first draft. And while this may be okay for simple writing tasks. But for complex curriculum design tasks, its just insanely draining. And so dissatisfying!