Skip to content

Highly-Cited “AI Erodes Critical Thinking” Study Appears To Be AI Generated Slop

This week, I want to highlight a substack post critiquing a recent research article. The author critically examines a widely referenced paper claiming that increased AI use degrades critical thinking skills. Pookins argues that the study’s design and methodology are fundamentally flawed: the sample isn’t representative, the survey measures self-reported beliefs rather than actual critical thinking performance, and many items intended to measure different constructs are essentially redundant. Because of these flaws, he asserts that the paper does not provide reliable evidence that AI use causes a decline in critical thinking, meaning that its frequent citation in media and academic discussions may be misleading or premature. Moreover, he points to evidence that the paper itself may have been AI-generated.

AI-Supported Civil Discourse

Sway is a chat platform that connects students with differing perspectives into one-on-one conversations and facilitates better discussions between them. Developed with Heterodox Academy and inspired by John Stuart Mill’s radical view that engaging with opposing perspectives is an essential tool for improving reasoning and solving complex problems, Sway aims to create online spaces where we can all learn to discuss controversial issues more openly and constructively.

Wrong answers, right learning: Using errors to deepen understanding

This systematic review examines how instructional materials that embed errors (so-called “erroneous examples”) or juxtapose incorrect and correct solutions (“contrasting erroneous examples”) can influence student learning across a variety of domains (mathematics, medicine, science). The authors reviewed 40 studies and found that these approaches can enhance learning — especially by helping students grasp both what not to do (negative knowledge) and what to do (positive knowledge) — but the benefits depend strongly on how the errors are used, what scaffolding (prompts, feedback) is provided, how complex the task is, and how much prior knowledge the learner has.