AI adoption among students has exploded in recent years, and some 55-70% of high school students and 85-95% of college students use AI tools for homework. While the temptation to hand off assignments wholesale to AI can be incredibly strong, especially given all the demands on students’ time, too much offloading can impair essential skill development.
There are many levels of AI use. AI can help a student get started on an assignment, organize ideas, create a study plan, or work through a difficult concept. But it can also write the outline, summarize the reading, solve the problem, and complete the entire assignment. The difference matters.
The question of whether your child is using AI for schoolwork is less critical than how your child is using AI. In time, nearly all students will be using AI in some form. What is critical is whether the AI use is contributing to your child’s development as an independent learner, or if it is taking over tasks and making them more dependent and less capable of managing future challenges.
What Does AI Have to Do With Executive Function?
Executive function skills help students manage the work of learning: planning ahead, getting started, staying organized, managing time, and monitoring their own progress. These skills are as critical to academic success as they are fundamental to success beyond our academic life, in the world of work, adulting, sustaining relationships, and more. While AI can bolster these skills and help a student with planning, organization, and time management, it can also completely bypass the development of these life skills.
Consider a student with a 10-page research paper due in two weeks. A student might use AI to break the assignment into manageable steps and create a timeline and schedule. Or they might wait until the night before and ask AI to outline the paper, summarize the sources, and develop the argument. While both approaches may result in a completed assignment, they aren't building the same skills.
The Struggle Is Key
Students and parents alike are concerned about specific academic outcomes, particularly grades and maintaining a competitive GPA. But how many parents or students are thinking more broadly, longer-term, regarding the student’s ability to manage themselves in a variety of future contexts? When a student offloads the challenge, the friction, the stress of having to manage a cognitively demanding process to an AI to get an easy A, they are gaining something, and they are losing something.
The Science of Desirable Difficulties
Researchers have pointed to the value of struggle to build core competencies. Robert and Elizabeth Bork of UCLA framed the concept of desirable difficulties and how struggle leads to changes in how we encode and remember material and processes. Decrease the struggle, and you degrade the learning and the long-term transfer.
Eisenberger’s Learned Industriousness Theory posits that overcoming our present challenges primes us to more readily take on future challenges. And we have early evidence that relying too heavily on AI to manage our cognitive tasks weakens our critical thinking skills. MIT found decreases in brain activation in students who relied heavily on AI to complete assignments. A study involving 26,000 students in middle school and high school found that heavy AI use was correlated with faster HW completion, higher HW scores, and markedly lower exam scores.
Do we want to raise robust critical thinkers who will not shy away from future challenges? If so, we have to consider how much cognitive offloading is taking place when students use AI tools and whether AI is supporting the student’s ability to manage the work, or simply replacing it. If our goal is a competent and confident learner, we must be wary of letting the AI do everything. The struggle, the friction, the overcoming—that builds durable and highly transferable Executive Function skills.
Is AI Supporting or Replacing These Skills?
Let’s examine how AI use can help build and support or weaken and replace these critical Executive Functioning Skills:
Planning
Supporting: Using AI to break a large project into smaller steps or create a realistic timeline.
Replacing: Waiting until the deadline approaches and asking AI to complete multiple stages of the assignment.
Students need to cultivate the skills of anticipating how much time a task will take and then structuring enough time to allow them to perform the task well. Building planning skills will pay off in courses and in so many non-academic areas: applying for internships and jobs, managing tasks at work, and contemplating what future resources will be needed in a variety of contexts.
Getting Started (AKA Task Initiation)
Supporting: Asking AI to brainstorm multiple ways to approach an assignment and then choosing an entry point.
Replacing: Asking AI to produce the opening because starting feels difficult.
AI can help students get unstuck without taking away the valuable experience of working through the struggle of choosing a starting point. If you offload the beginning, you’ve already ceded much of the cognitive work of framing a thesis, and you may end up with something much less original or interesting than you could have come up with independently. You get to know your own mind, and what you can contribute, when you stick with the discomfort of the blank page.
Organization
Supporting: Using AI to help categorize research or organize information a student has already gathered.
Replacing: Asking AI to determine the argument, structure, and supporting points of your thesis.
It is critical that a student learn to discriminate what is valuable, what is principal, and what is subordinate, and then take the time to structure the key ideas. Discernment is a tremendously valuable skill that will pay dividends in a world replete with AI-generated content. A student who can prioritize and structure information and determine how to skillfully weave an argument will have advantages throughout life. Conversely, a student who cannot distinguish what matters and how ideas fit together will struggle in many domains.
Time Management
Supporting: Using AI to estimate how long different parts of an assignment might take or to help build a study schedule.
Replacing: Relying on AI to rescue a student from a last-minute scramble and knock out an assignment.
Meeting the deadline by outsourcing the work to AI is a far cry from learning how to manage time effectively. There will be many times when the ability to estimate time and adhere to a set schedule will be critical to success.
Calibrating Comprehension
Supporting: Using AI to generate practice questions, provide feedback, or test whether a student can explain a concept clearly.
Replacing: Accepting AI-generated answers without questioning their accuracy or evaluating the reasoning behind them.
AI is a powerful ally in helping students gauge their comprehension. Do I really know this material? Passively reading notes or reviewing a study guide won't tell you that. Having a Large Language Model generate challenging questions, assess your knowledge, provide critical feedback, and help you work through problems can help you calibrate comprehension and strengthen your skills.
Can AI Help Students Build Executive Function Skills?
Yes. But relatively few students are using AI in ways that enhance their EF skills. Too many are offloading tasks to AI, depriving themselves of desirable difficulties that help build those skills. It takes some discipline to hold back and not ask Claude, Chat, or Gemini to complete the assigned task, the problem set, the presentation.
The Hidden Cost of Letting AI Do the Work
So many students are not thinking about long-term skill development, but rather, how soon they can get back online with their friends. This is where parents, tutors, and teachers can help provide some context and frame things more broadly, considering short- and long-term goals. Because the tool can do the work for you does not mean that you should let it. There are very real costs to our emergent and amazing technologies, and those need to be part of the conversation of responsible use.
A Simple Test for Parents
Instead of focusing only on how often your student uses AI, ask them to explain how they use it, why they use it, what they are getting from it, and what they are giving up by using it. Get that critical thinking working. This is the heart of metacognition: students contemplating their own learning, which is the first step in taking ownership of their learning process.
Do students want to cultivate long-term skills or simply get the assignment out of the way? AI, when misused, can provide a short-term fix but lead to long-term deficits. As students take greater ownership of their learning, they can become more reflective about when AI helps and when it gets in the way.
When Convenience Comes at a Cost
It’s not a huge deal that we cannot do long-form math without a calculator, or remember people’s phone numbers, or drive in our cities without Google Maps. These represent a relatively small price to pay to have a supercomputer in our pockets at all times. But if using our technology degrades our ability to think for ourselves, manage ourselves, take on future challenges, then we are giving up too much. A tool can be liberating and empowering, or it can become a crutch. It’s all in how you use it.
The Ultimate Goal Is Independence
If it’s not already, AI is going to be part of students' academic lives, as it will become a part of all of our lives. The challenge is to help students recognize when AI is giving them valuable support, and when it is taking over work they need to learn how to do themselves. Using the frame of executive functioning skill development can help put AI use in a broader context. Open the lens wider. It’s not enough to get tomorrow’s assignment turned in; we are shooting for more than that.
Our goal is not a GPA, or even a particular college admissions outcome, but the development of an independent learner, capable of reflection, planning, organizing, managing one’s time, recruiting support when needed, and navigating all manner of future challenges in academia and well beyond.
