AI is definitely having a significant impact on learning in high school right now. At least at my daughter’s high school, she is seeing a lot of cheating, and even when it’s not strictly cheating, a lot of simply letting AI do the thinking for you. I also think students’ motivation to learn is being negatively affected by uncertainty around how AI is going to affect all types of jobs that require education.
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The ChatGPT effect is certainly going to be a real problem, especially since it can now do math.
For us, the class above D26 had a LOT of issues related to behavior and ability. On the math issue, D26 noted that at her school, when she took class as a junior (Calc is mostly taken by seniors) that the seniors all did pretty poorly on exams and asked for lots of extensions for work. She was nervous they weren’t going to complete all the units before the exam! She’s now tutoring the next class and she notes they seemed much more engaged and able. Datapoint of one, though.
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Education is different post COVID and will never be what it was before 2020. Same with other systems in our life. Technology is what caused the change, COVID just accelerated it, and the pace at which tech and AI are changing the way students learn and act will be hard to surmount if educational institutions keep longing for good old 2019 days. Even then tech was changing how students learned - kids stopped reading for pleasure, plagerism got easier, cheating too. Students are learning how to be efficient with their schooling, I mean that is the whole point of tech, ultimate optimization, and in the process the idea that traditional schooling and teachers aren’t necessary becomes more accepted. Students are less interested in learning for the sake of learning, they just want to get the tasks done to get the grade to go to college and then repeat the cycle.
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Yes, and I’m seeing it carry over to college – speaking as a history professor who is constantly trying to tweak assignments and emphasize skills to stay ahead of AI (but if the stack of final papers I just graded is any indication, I’m not succeeding).
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I am remembering the dawn of Google and everyone claiming “why bother to learn history… you can just look it up”.
And now we see an entire generation (plus their apparently illiterate parents) who don’t understand January 6th, the Spanish flu, the rise of fascist leaders in the 1930’s, the passing of the Civil Rights/Voting Rights acts/laws, Jim Crow, etc.
I have enormous compassion and a ton of respect for anyone trying to teach history right now.
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In some ways, Google changed history teaching for the better – because it became clear (we hoped) that learning history was never just about rote knowledge or memorizing dates and timelines, but rather it was a skill set and a discipline: habits of mind and ways of knowing that we collectively call historical thinking, which are broadly applicable in many settings and professions. In other words, history is a way to think and evaluate evidence and not just what you can call up on Google. But now AI is relieving students of the burden of thinking, and it’s harder to convince them that the effort is worth it.
The same applies to math, too, I imagine (getting back to the topic of the thread).
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Usually, the more advanced students in math are the better ones, so no surprise that a student in calculus in 11th grade does better than most of those in calculus in 12th grade.
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Also, many primary source documents are now more accessible than they used to be. For example, the declaration of causes of secession by seceding states in 1860-1861 give important insight into the cause of the US Civil War. Where they used be hiding in dusty archives, now they can be pulled up quickly in a web search.
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Absolutely, and that’s a good example. I do a whole lesson on those for my “it-was-because-of-states’-rights” crowd.
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I’ve always been fascinated by the American Revolution, American Civil War and World War II. Growing up in the “Land of Lincoln” our AP US History Course seems to have had a bit of a different flavor than the APUSH Class for my three kids in one of the ‘elite magnet’ high schools here in Raleigh.
I’m about 1/3 of the way into Erik Larsen’s “The Demon of Unrest” on the buildup to the start of the Civil War focusing significantly on Charleston and the Harbor Forts - I know he does take some authors liberties in personal story telling, but he’s pretty much skewered the revisionists history on that matter with details such as the newspaper headlines and articles of the day, specific dates, speakers and speeches and votes on the different city and state legislatures parliamentarian floors…
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For avoidance of doubt, the comparison was between the students in the class of 2025 taking Calc last year versus the students in the class of 2026 taking Calc this year. D26 noted that the students this year (mostly class of 2026 with a few 2027s) seemed more motivated than the class of 2025 students last year. This wasn’t meant to be a comparison of the class of 2026 students that took the class as 11th graders with the 2025 students.
Also, this is a datapoint of one, so I won’t try to overly dissect. Just an observation and why I thought perhaps those that took Algebra 1 during the remote year might struggle more in later math classes.
That would be my daughter! She taught 7th grade Texas history last year and her students had NO base level of information on anything.
She said her biggest issue is dealing with energy drinks! The kids all drink them all day long. No one sits still or pays attention during the day.
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Thankfully, AI usage and cheating did not seem to be much of an issue at D26s high school. I worry she will be in for a rude awakening in college if the number of kids who just AI all their schoolwork is as rampant as people say. She chose to go to a small liberal arts college in large part because she loves the small classes where everyone is discussing and engaged with one another as opposed to lectures.
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My DIL is a university history professor–her exams are all blue book now. It’s a slow turn back to old school pen and paper.
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AI Overview
Graduating seniors often struggle with math due to grade inflation that inflates graduation rates over actual competency, learning loss from disrupted pandemic schooling, teacher shortages forcing reliance on substitutes, and a modern reliance on smartphones that disrupt attention spans. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
Key systemic and behavioral factors include:
- Policy & Grade Inflation: An estimated (\frac{2}{3}) of high school graduates are not truly “college-ready” in math, yet schools utilize credit-recovery and easier online make-ups to keep graduation rates artificially high.
- Pandemic & Foundational Gaps: Lingering setbacks from remote learning are still echoing on college campuses, resulting in a steep increase in freshmen requiring remedial math and struggling with middle-school-level equations.
- Teacher Shortages: High-poverty and high-need schools face a high turnover of qualified math teachers, forcing students to rely on substitutes or self-taught online modules.
- Tech & Attention Spans: The steep decline in national math proficiency correlates with widespread smartphone adoption, which has shortened attention spans and reduced engagement with complex problem-solving. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
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I never stopped giving blue book exams – for awhile, that made me seem like a dinosaur, but blue books are back in style! I allow my students to bring a cheat sheet (basically bribing them to study), because I’m more interested in synthesis than memorization. But I can tell who used AI to produce their cheat sheets, because their exams are not nearly as good as those who do the work themselves.
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Weird how AI doesn’t blame AI for learning loss.
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I don’t think AI has much to do with it overall except it provides an easy way to skate. It started years before AI in schools that didn’t require the memorization of addition, substraction and multiplication facts. If those elementary facts aren’t sent to long term memory it makes it more difficult to do higher math. It’s like phonics vs word memorization.
I’ve mentioned the “Sold a Story” podcast before which focuses on reading failure in schools (a few new episodes by the way) and math instruction parallels.
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I’ve been teaching for over 30 years, first in HS and mostly in college. So I agree that there are multiple factors contributing to learning declines over the decades, with some more impactful than others. But the acceleration of the process that I’ve seen in the past few years is stunning in comparison to what I had been seeing for my entire career up to that point. It’s happened so fast, and the problem is absolutely largely due to AI. Students can’t even muster the initiative and resourcefulness for old-fashioned cheating anymore (not that I’m endorsing any form of cheating). Plagiarism was an easy way to skate. AI is something else entirely.
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Berkeley faculty request reinstatement of SAT/ACT
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