Verified by 
Artificial Intelligence
How AI Could Damage Your Child’s Reading and Writing Skills
When AI replaces reading, the weakest students suffer the most.
Posted August 21, 2024 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- AI damages the reading skills of poor readers who rely on it to avoid reading and writing.
- Students learn most of their vocabulary from reading, not direct instruction.
- Less reading leads to slower, more effortful reading, which then leads to even less reading.
- Volume and frequency of reading correlates to academic achievement across subjects.
If you’re a parent or a teacher—especially of English Language Arts (ELA)—you should be losing sleep over the four most harmful effects of AI. From Claude to ChatGPT, AI enables students to generate essays, papers, and even answers to tests without reading a word. Not even of AI’s hallucination-filled responses to the questions that students should be answering for themselves.
This latest development adds to the wealth of online resources that offer poor and reluctant readers summaries and analyses of virtually every book on ELA syllabi. Sources like SparkNotes and Study.com already invite reluctant readers to cobble together writing assignments or fumble their way through class discussions of reading assignments. However, AI now removes reading from the loop entirely.
For slow, struggling, reluctant readers, the damage will be both profound and long-lasting—worsening reading and writing skills and aggravating already-poor performances across science, math, history, and, of course, both reading and writing for four distinct reasons.
1. Students learn most of their vocabulary from reading, not instruction.
Students with learning difficulties enjoy three times the benefits from instruction on vocabulary in grades K-12. However, a meta-analysis of 37 studies—and thousands of students—found that direct instruction on vocabulary lacked any measurable impact on standardized reading measures. Moreover, for students in secondary grades reading across subjects, the benefits of teaching vocabulary were statistically insignificant.
In contrast, a more recent study found that students’ free reading was 1.7 times more effective than learning vocabulary in class in the short term. Furthermore, students’ self-directed reading was 12 times more effective in developing students’ vocabularies over the longer term.
2. The frequency of reading correlates to academic achievement across subjects.
Students who read for pleasure benefit from higher measures of academic success across disciplines, including science, math, history, and ELA. Even in a study conducted across only a single marking period for 11th graders, self-identified avid readers scored an average of 8 percent higher on subject-specific test scores than reluctant readers. By their own admission, reluctant readers identified themselves as having never finished reading a book or reading fewer than two books per year.
3. Less reading = more effortful reading = even less reading
Most commercial reading programs provide about 15 minutes of daily reading activity. Yet students become better readers faster and excel at reading across more subjects when teachers provide students with access to wider reading options and more time for independent reading. Moreover, strong readers display a stronger mastery of vocabulary than weak readers.
In stark contrast, weak readers struggle to identify word meanings and exhibit difficulties in understanding sentence structure. Furthermore, vocabulary and sentence structure prove essential to reading with speed and ease, making reading slower, more challenging, and still less inviting to poor readers. Reluctant readers are seldom strong, speedy readers.
4. Reading sources strongly influence writers’ word choice and sentence structure.
Finally, good writers acquire their skills from the sources they read. As writers, the sources we read strongly influence our word choice and sentence structure. In studies of reading and its influence on word choice and sentence structure, the most sophisticated writers routinely read well-written news and cultural magazines rather than literature or fiction. And the link between reading sources and writing style proved greater than the frequency of reading favored sources—or the frequency of writing.
Strategies to Counter AI’s Influence
But parents and teachers can still minimize the odds of reluctant readers reaching for ChatGPT or even SparkNotes through four proven strategies. First, if teachers have latitude on the books they assign, they should choose a book published no earlier than 2023—or a book with virtually no online presence, which can include some older, terrific books that have seldom featured on school syllabi. Since AI generates its predictions from online sources, this off-the-radar title will generate easily spotted AI hallucinations. Ideally, this sign should prompt an immediate do-over, a warning about a failing grade, and a brief communication with a parent.
Second, in essays, teachers should request at least two direct quotes for each claim students make. Even for evergreen titles, like Pride and Prejudice or, god forbid, Lord of the Flies, AI currently fabricates second or third direct quotes—again, easily spotted because the AI typically attributes an off-topic quote from the wrong character to provide a second or third quote.
Third, teachers should ask students to take unusual perspectives in their writing assignments. For example, what would happen if Sherlock Holmes got involved in investigating the peculiar events at Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre? Humans excel at divergent thinking; AI is currently incapable of it.
And, finally, teachers use class discussions as a springboard for writing assignments. Teachers can require students to provide evidence from their reading assignment to prove or disprove points raised in class—something AI will be unable to hack.
