It’s not news to say that digital technologies have had a profound impact on education. But as someone whose years of formal education are long behind me, it’s still hard to fathom the dramatic changes students and teachers are going through with generative artificial intelligence.

I’ve been commissioning a series of articles on AI and education, and the one that has resonated most with readers was written by a cognitive psychologist. In it, Boise State University’s Brian Stone surveys the emerging research on how gen AI affects cognitive processes, such as learning.

Preliminary studies can be nuanced and difficult to draw hard-and-fast conclusions from, but decades of cognitive psychology research are crystal clear on the importance of effort in learning. “I tell my students the brain is a lot like a muscle: It takes genuine hard work to see gains. Without challenging that muscle, it won’t grow bigger,” Stone writes.

Students, meanwhile, are being presented with extremely powerful tools where the temptation to simply “have the AI do it for me” must be quite strong. Stone provides an expert-guided review of recent research and a useful framework for approaching AI in the classroom.