What does learning look like in the age of AI?
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These headlines tend to frighten educators both about their current work and their future relevance. It has caused me to honestly reflect on what I want my students to do and know upon leaving my courses.
Do I want them to know HOLM (the acronym for Shakespeare's tragedies)?
Or, do I want them to think critically about human behavior and universal themes?
What it comes down to is that I want my students to think about their learning. This is why the use of AI presents problems in the classroom. Not because it shortcuts creativity or gives them ideas they wouldn't have come up with. Those aspects can be assets to certain learners. As I wrote here, I want students to know, or remember, the purpose of assessment, and it's not to submit the correct answers.
In a word, students need Metacognition.
Metacognition is the process by which learners use knowledge of the task at hand, knowledge of learning strategies, and knowledge of themselves to plan their learning, monitor their progress toward a learning goal, and then evaluate the outcome. MIT Teaching + Learning Lab
Classroom Level:
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Teachers and students must remember that AI cannot do this for them. Recently, I completed a course AI & The Classroom by Michigan Virtual that emphasized the importance of Process over Product. Metacognition not only assists students within the classroom, but it strengthens their skills for learning outside of the classroom as well. It promotes brain development, critical thinking, and problem-solving (Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning). Long after they forget what PEMDAS or onomatopoeia is, they will remember the process of owning their own learning, assessing knowledge gaps, and using resources to fill those gaps.
Teachers already have the tools to support metacognition in the classroom. This might look like:
- scheduling time for self-reflection
- Students can pause anywhere in a lesson to consider what is easy and what is hard, how they know what they know, and where they can look for answers. (How Metacognition Can Improve Learning Outcomes)
- incorporating more higher-order thinking skills
- trusting students to lead their own learning (even in younger grades: Fostering Metacognition in Preschool)
School/System Level
This kind of learning is going to take time. Administrators must consider whether the value of learning is in the volume of information taught or the depth of understanding and ownership that students take away. Personally, I would rather a student read 1 book and write 1 essay with reflection and fidelity than read 4 books and write 3 essays just to make the grade.
Education for ALL Students
Metacognition also benefits learners in diverse ways. First, most students can perform the tasks and make the grades satisfactorily, thereby masking their lack of metacognition. It is only now that the majority of college students (those are the students, generally, who performed well in high school) admit to using AI to cheat that it is evident that metacognition is lacking in their education.
As of eight months ago [January 2024], a representative survey in the US found that 82% of undergraduates and 72% of K12 students had used AI for school. (Ethan Mollick, 30 Aug, 2024)
They feel only the product is valuable to the education system and have abandoned the product in favor of what they view as a more valuable use of their time. It has long been hypothesized that the value of college is not in the learning, but in the merit the degree signifies.
Beyond those who "play school" well, metacognition benefits diverse learners who do not fit into the common system of rote memory and performance tasks. Metacognition assumes an asset-based approach to students: they have the ability to own their learning and reflect meaningfully.
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The age of AI doesn't need to signal the educational apocalypse, but it can serve as the impetuous to shift the approach from What to Learn to How to Learn. In my opinion, this shift is long overdue.
*Images generated with AI. All original text is human-generated and, humbly, mistakes are my own.
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