by Ruth Shillair and Bill Dutton
There has been much discussion of how reliance on digital media might undermine skills in reading and writing, as with pen and paper, and, in American education, with a copy of The Elements of Style by W. Strunk Jr.& E.B. White. But the loss of traditional skills goes far beyond cursive handwriting; it might well extend to the very act of writing and entail critical reading skills as individuals turn increasingly to audio and video responses, such as relying on voice search.
Students are getting very adept at using AI chatbots for answering essay questions and using AI tools to write papers. This potentially positive development for students raises concerns about how to determine whether and what a student has learned. What indeed are measurable outcomes in learning and education?
With growing cuts in educational budgets and more pressure on instructors to teach more students, it might become tempting to accept submitted assignments without closely evaluating them closely, such as whether they are generated by AI tools. It is often anchored in an honor system. As the AI tools grow more sophisticated it well be increasingly difficult to determine whether a student’s ‘original writing’ is genuine.
So not only are students losing the incentives to develop the mental skills of reflection on a concept deeply enough to write creatively about it, their teachers could be losing the incentives to grade their students’ work thoughtfully. Why would a teacher read a student’s work carefully if they suspect it is generated by AI? Today, there are few incentives for calling out AI work and it is far more efficient to just tacitly ignore it. Teaching the writing process is laborious and time consuming in a world that doesn’t value the investment of time in skills that should have already been mastered by the time a student joins a university.
In addition, critical reading skills are being lost on students as they increasingly ‘learn’ from short postings, short videos, and targeted excerpts of books online. Educational settings that not only allow but encourage students to read even controversial books and critically think about the messages in them take time and the environment that allows students and instructors to probe uncomfortable places. Moving away from larger, more classical, books to shorter novelettes is popular with students and allows for minimal mental engagement while allowing some schools to check off the “students read and discussed literature” box without offending anyone or resulting in deep thinking versus casual reading.
Both reading and writing well takes hours of a student’s individualized focus, with both instructors and parents or tutors taking time to sit with students and give personal feedback and encouragement as they learn these difficult tasks. This still happens for families who can afford to send their children to more intensive schools or for parents who have the time to sit and work with their children to support their learning. It isn’t that parents don’t care. Often they might be working several lower wage jobs just to pay for the basics, making it so much easier to hand a child a phone or tablet to keep them quiet and entertained. Unfortunately, this means that educational situations where families have the resources to support critical reading and the development of advanced writing skills are limited to the more “elite” systems, however low or high you want to define elite education.
To our amazement, to accommodate this new standard of short and superficial reading, the SAT exams have changed their standard 500-750 text sections that asked multiple questions that included not only facts, but inferences. They now have passages of 25-150 words with one simple question based directly on that section (Torres, 2025). Even though the reasons for these changes are beyond the scope of this posting, it allows high school graduates to apply for competitive college programs without having demonstrated the critical reading skills they will need to succeed in these programs.
Students without writing skills will also suffer marginalization. To deal with concerns over the use of AI at the college level, many programs are returning to the “blue book” method of examination, where students are required to write answers in a small notebook with no computer assistance at all (Walker, 2026). This provides far more assurance that what is submitted is the student’s original – not AI-enabled – work.
For students who have the ability and training, it is likely that to write grammatically, accurately, and quickly in a high-stakes situation, will do well. Those who can think creatively and know the materials but don’t have the small motor skills or training in writing will be further marginalized and fail in systems that have supported certain styles of learning that are suddenly taken away. This has long been an inequality between American students in elite high schools and public high schools and universities that do not place a strong focus on writing skills.
The answers are not easy, but the current trajectory of a digitally-enabled educational system looks like there could be the development of an “elite” track that supports deep learning. All is not lost as human creativity often finds a way in the most challenging situations. There is a trend among Gen Z influencers who are reading the “classics” and posting their reviews on TikTok or X. People like Chris Fizer @ChrisKindaReads passionately share their insights after reading “War and Peace” or “Jane Eyre”. Their excitement for learning deeply and thinking independently give hope for students inclined to educate themselves. They can use social media tools and technology to promote the deep-thinking skills they might have missed growing up or by relying too heavily on video and AI-enabled answers to their questions. But a student should not need to rely on online support groups that share the joy of learning deep concepts. That should be baked into an equitable educational system.
In the ideal world of education, all students will have the chance of acquiring “elite” skills in learning, if we use the tools correctly. Is that not too idealistic?
Resources
Strunk, W., Jr., and White, E. B. (any edition), The Elements of Style.
Torres, M. (2025) The SAT’s Trust Fall: Legacy standardized-testing firms are cutting rigor to please students. https://jamesgmartin.center/2025/06/the-sats-trust-fall/
Ruth Shillair is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Media + Information Master’s Program in the Department of Media & Information in MSU’s College of Communication Arts & Sciences.