Source: RDNE Stock Project/Pexels
If you’re a parent or a teacher—especially in English Language Arts (ELA)—the four most damaging effects of AI should give you sleepless nights. From Claude to ChatGPT, AI enables students to create essays, papers, and even test answers without reading a word. Not even the AI’s hallucinogenic answers to the questions students should be answering themselves.
This latest development adds to the wealth of online resources that offer struggling and reluctant readers summaries and analyses of virtually any ELA curriculum-based book. Sources like SparkNotes and Study.com already invite reluctant readers to cobble together written assignments or stumble through class discussions of reading assignments. But AI now takes reading out of the loop entirely.
For slow, reluctant readers, the damage is profound and long-lasting: their literacy skills deteriorate, and their already poor performance in science, math, history, and, of course, literacy becomes even worse, for four different reasons.
1. Students learn most of their vocabulary through reading, not through class.
Students with learning disabilities benefit three times as much from vocabulary instruction in grades K-12. However, a meta-analysis of 37 studies—and thousands of students—found that direct vocabulary instruction had no measurable impact on standardized reading tests. Moreover, the benefits of vocabulary instruction for high school students reading across subjects were statistically insignificant.
In contrast, a more recent study found that in the short term, students’ free reading was 1.7 times more effective than learning vocabulary in class. In addition, in the long term, students’ self-directed reading was 12 times more effective at developing their vocabulary.
2. Reading frequency correlates with academic success in all subjects.
Students who read for pleasure achieve higher academic success in all subjects, including science, math, history, and English as a second language. Even in a study conducted over a single testing period of 11th-grade students, self-described avid readers scored an average of 8 percent higher on subject-specific tests than reluctant readers. Reluctant readers reported never finishing a book or reading fewer than two books per year.
3. Reading less = more strenuous reading = even less reading
Most commercial reading programs provide about 15 minutes of reading activity per day. But students become better readers faster and can excel in more subjects when teachers provide them with more reading options and more time for independent reading. In addition, good readers have better vocabulary skills than poor readers.
In contrast, weak readers have difficulty recognizing word meanings and show difficulty understanding sentence structure. Moreover, vocabulary and sentence structure prove to be essential for fast and effortless reading, making reading slower, more challenging, and even less inviting for weak readers. Reluctant readers are rarely strong, fast readers.
Source: RDNE Stock Project/Pexels
4. The author’s choice of words and sentence structure are strongly influenced by the reading sources.
Finally, good writers learn their skills from the sources they read. As writers, the sources we read strongly influence our word choice and sentence structure. Studies of reading and its impact on word choice and sentence structure have found that the most sophisticated writers regularly read well-written news and culture magazines, rather than literature or fiction. And the link between reading sources and writing style was found to be greater than the frequency of reading preferred sources—or the frequency of writing.
Strategies to combat the influence of AI
But parents and teachers can minimize the likelihood of reluctant readers turning to ChatGPT or even SparkNotes by using four proven strategies. First, if teachers have leeway in choosing the books they assign, they should choose a book that was not published before 2023—or a book that has virtually no online presence, which may include some older, great books that were rarely on school curricula. Since the AI generates its predictions from online sources, that off-the-radar title will generate easily recognizable AI hallucinations. Ideally, that sign should prompt an immediate retake, a warning of a failing grade, And a short message to a parent.
Second, teachers should require at least two direct citations for each claim made by students in essays. Even in evergreen titles such as pride and Prejudice or, God forbid, Lord of the FliesAI is currently inventing second or third direct quotes – which again is easy to spot because AI will usually attribute an off-topic quote to the wrong person in order to provide a second or third quote.
Source: Yan Krukov/Pexels
Third, teachers should ask students to consider unusual perspectives in their writing assignments. For example, what would happen if Sherlock Holmes were involved in the investigation of the strange events at Thornfield Hall? Jane Eyre– Humans are masters of divergent thinking; AI is currently not capable of this.
Finally, teachers use class discussions as a starting point for writing assignments. Teachers can require students to provide evidence from their reading assignments to prove or disprove points raised in class—something AI will not be able to do.
