He is Robbing Students of Critical Thinking, Professor Says

Generate he is robbing students of Critical Thinking – and Handing Big Tech More Over Over How KnowLEDGE IS CREATED.

That’s the warning from Kimberley Hardcastle, an Assistant Professor of Business and Marketing at Northumbria University.

In a piece for the conversation, she argued that universities are distracted by plagiarism concertns while missing the Deeper Shift: students are outsourcing thought itelf.

Students are skipping the hard part

Hardcastle pointed to date from anthropic, the Company Behind Claude, which Analyzed About One Million Anonymized Conversations Over An 18-Day Period in April.

AFTER FILTERING TO 574,740 EDUCATION-RELATED CATS TID TO VORTISTY UNIVERSITY Email Accounts, the Company Found that 39.3% of Student Interactions Involved Creating or Polishing Educational Essay Drafts, Practice Questions, or Study Summaries. Another 33.5% Asked Claude to solve assignments directly.

In Doing SO, Hardcastle Said, Students Are Delegating Key Parts of the Learning Process to Machines.

“Students can produce sophisticated outputs with the cognitive journey traditionally required to create say,” She wrote.

She said the risk is that students are starting to validate ideas by how convincingly he explains say Rather than Through their Own Independent Analysis.

From Learning to Outsourcing to Big Tech

For Centuries, Education relied on Teachers Guiding students Through Medy Reasoning and Debate.

Generating he is uppending that, she said, by producing instant, autoritative-sunding aswers that blur the originween original thought and machine-assists shortcuts.

Hardcastle Called it an “Intellectual Revolution,” OneWre Traditional Skills like Weiging Evidance or Evaluating Sources risk Being sidelined when the “source” is a Black-Box trained on data no one can full see.

And what Makes this shift more alarming, she said, is who controls it: a handful of tech companies now the driverines of Knowledge, with their biases, design choices, and commercial incentives what students Learn and how they learn it.

It ‘not the first time, though, hardcastle said – social media already exploited attention for profit.

But this time, hardcastle warned, the stakes are Higher. IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT WHAT DISTRACTS US – IT’S ABOUT WOW WE THINK.

“IT RISKS GRANTING POWER Over How KnowLEDGE IS CREATED to the Tech Companies Production General AI Tools,” She Said.

Universities Can’t Sit Back

Most Universities Are Still Reacting to Surface Issues Like Catching Plagiarism, Tweaking Assessment, and Teaching He Literacy, but That’s Not Enough, Hardcastle Said.

The Real Task, Said, Is ENSURING LEART, swimming profit, defines how he is used.

She, Howver, HighLighted someone Progress, Like Centers for Responsible He, Including at Her Own Institution, Working to Put Educators in the Lead.

But with Deliberate Action, Big Tech Could end up deciding what KnowLEDGE LOOKS LIKE FOR THE NEXT GENERATION, SHE WARNED.

“Generatative ai isn’t just a sophisticated calculator,” Hardcastle Said, “It Changes How We Undersand Knowledge.”