Generative AI (GenAI) is now a fixture in students’ lives, and it’s leaving school leaders with a tough call in the writing classroom. Ban it, and students lose a valuable writing coach. Bring it in too early, and some may never learn to write well on their own.
A new study published in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning found that while primary students writing with GenAI outscored peers writing alone or with classmates in creative writing, they were the least absorbed in their writing. The researchers found that students who believed in their own writing ability also performed better.
So where should schools draw the line between protecting students from AI and preparing them to use it well?
Where AI helps, and where it hurts
Professor Mary Ryan, Dean of Education at Monash University and a former classroom teacher of 10 years, has led Australian Research Council-funded projects in classroom writing and is internationally recognised for her research in writing pedagogy. Her current work explores a reflexive approach to teaching writing in the age of GenAI.
She says GenAI presents both an opportunity and a challenge for classroom writing.
“The longstanding challenge in developing effective writing is now compounded by the rapid uptake of GenAI in writing classrooms,” Professor Ryan told The Educator. “Evidence suggests that student use of generative AI has moved rapidly from marginal to mainstream since 2022 with at least 80% of Australian teenagers and more than two-thirds of early secondary teachers reporting AI use.”
Read more: Have schools gone 'cart before the horse' with AI?
Professor Ryan said students are using GenAI for far more than tidying up their work, relying on chatbots to choose what information to include, how to build their arguments and even which words to use.
“Recent research identifies a ‘performance paradox’ whereby GenAI can improve short-term writing performance while potentially undermining durable learning and knowledge construction,” she said.
“Strategic use may involve feedback on grammar and cohesion, prompting new ideas to follow up about a topic, or beneficial offloading by reducing unnecessary cognitive load, for example, surface-level editing once students have solidified the grammatical knowledge and skills to edit independently.”
Professor Ryan said some parts of writing are too important to outsource to AI.
“It is important to preserve the important cognitive work of idea generation, purposeful language choice, creative and communicative flair, development of a logical argument, verification and synthesis of information and critical evaluation of the topic,” she said.
“Writing contributes to cognitive development and engagement and is not a skill we want our students to lose.”
The skills students need to judge AI
Asked how school leaders should decide where AI belongs in the writing classroom, Kathleen Killick, CEO of Seven Steps to Writing Success, said the answer has less to do with the technology than with the learner.
“The primary years are about building strong foundations: the skills and confidence students need to succeed in the world, and now in a world with AI,” Killick told The Educator. “Those skills need to be explicitly taught.”
Killick said it is often assumed that students know how to come up with ideas, plan a piece and write a first draft, but most need real help.
“These skills should be broken down and taught step by step, just like spelling or times tables,” she said. “They're also the skills students need to judge whether anything AI gives them is any good.”
Killick said a student who has never been taught to write a strong opening won't recognise a weak one.
“Worse, they're far more likely to ask AI to write one for them, because they've never learnt to do it themselves.”
As students move into secondary school, AI can earn a place, ideally with a teacher guiding how it's used, Killick said.
“For Principals, the most useful test is who is doing the thinking,” she said. “Where AI takes over the thinking, learning stalls. Where it frees up teachers' time, for example by speeding up marking so feedback reaches students while the writing is still fresh, it can make a real difference.”