What do students lose when they rely on AI for homework?
Marketplace Tech
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
More than 60% of middle, high school, and college students in the U.S. are turning to AI for homework help, according to a new study from Rand. Some use it to help them brainstorm or like an encyclopedia. Others do it to get answers.
But while kids are relying more on AI, about two-thirds of students surveyed in the study also believe that this AI use will hurt their critical thinking skills.
Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Heather Schwartz, co-director of the American Youth Panel at Rand and one of the authors of the report, about why students are worried.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The danger of using AI to write a first draft of anything. |
| 0:05.8 | From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. |
| 0:08.4 | I'm Stephanie Hughes. |
| 0:18.7 | More than 60% of middle, high school and college students in the U.S. are turning to AI for |
| 0:23.6 | homework help, according to a new study from RAND. Some use it to help them brainstorm, or like an |
| 0:28.7 | encyclopedia. Others do use it to get answers. But while kids are using AI more, more than |
| 0:35.2 | two-thirds also believe that this AI use will hurt their critical thinking skills. |
| 0:39.9 | I asked Heather Schwartz, one of the authors of the report, about why students are worried. |
| 0:44.9 | I have a daughter who's 13, and I help her with math. |
| 0:48.8 | She's taken a picture of a math question, plugged it into chat GPT, gotten a really beautiful and elegant answer. |
| 0:57.4 | And not just, you know, the answer is 67. It walks you through the logic of the whole question. |
| 1:03.0 | But as you're doing that more and more, and you are not the person who is cognitively struggling |
| 1:09.1 | through that question to produce that answer, but you're a consumer. |
| 1:13.3 | You're a passive consumer of work that was already cognitive work that was done by someone else, |
| 1:18.0 | in this case, AI. It's just not the same kind of learning experience. And while the jury is still |
| 1:26.6 | out on exactly how AI is going to be impacting students learning, there's some, there's some studies out already that show some distressing results, meaning kids using AI are showing gains while they have access to the AI. But then once you take away the crutch, you take away the AI, |
| 1:45.9 | some of these kids are doing worse on the assessment than the students who never had access to AI in the |
| 1:52.5 | first place. So the fact that the kids themselves are saying that this is harming critical thinking |
| 1:56.8 | skills, I think should be, you know, sort of a canary in the coal mine. No, it's not proof that it is. |
| 2:02.4 | But if they think it is, I think that's something we should be listening to. |
| 2:06.2 | If students' ability to think critically is being hurt now, as they are worried about, |
| 2:11.3 | what could it mean for when they are in the workforce in five to ten years? |
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