Thinking with AI

Don't blame AI for students' inability to think critically, writes Dan Sarofian-Butin, an education professor at Merrimack College. That ship sailed -- or, to be accurate, started sinking -- years ago. He thinks teachers can use AI to encourage thinking.

AI will “diminish students’ critical thinking skills," say 90 percent of faculty in a national survey, he writes.  A recent Brookings report speaks of "cognitive decline." An MIT brain imaging study warns that long-term AI use could lead to “diminished critical inquiry, increased vulnerability to manipulation, decreased creativity…[and] risk internalizing shallow or biased perspectives.”

But the worries about students' inability to think critically predate ChatGPT, Sarofian-Butin writes. Using AI badly could make it worse. But he sees the potential to use AI to improve learning.

"If we really care about saving students’ critical thinking skills, we need to think critically ourselves about how to re-envision our education systems with the right guardrails and guideposts to leverage AI-driven tools rather than disengage from this transformational moment," he writes.

In his class on "Ethics, Society & Identity," he uses AI "as a daily tutor, Socratic conversation partner, and writing mentor." He builds a prompt for students to use to "talk with AI, and then reflect on the experience and what they learned."

Sarofian-Butin works on "developing engaging lectures, encouraging students to come to my office hours, personally responding to every single student’s reflection, staying after class to talk, and creating Zoom meetings anytime a student wants to brainstorm an idea or doesn’t understand the class lecture," he writes. But he can't provide individual feedback for 100 students.

AI, with the right prompts, "is always available, always patient, always clear, always ready to clarify any issue a student may bring up," he writes.

“Talking with the AI felt like bouncing ideas off a friend who kept me grounded,” a student wrote about his preparation for the midterm paper. “The AI kept asking follow-ups that made me refine my thinking step by step.”