Last week, The New York Times rounded up new research on how AI is changing how students learn. One preliminary study looked at a decade of data from millions of online math sessions. After ChatGPT became widely available, students often sped through questions a chatbot could easily answer, and their scores on those questions rose. But on proctored tests, without ChatGPT, the students did worse.
Another early study, from Middlebury College, adds a twist. Undergraduates who used AI to draft their essays then saw their test scores slip a week later once they had to work on their own. But students who used AI as a tutor to explain concepts and clarify ideas held onto their gains and wrote better essays.
So the question isn’t whether students use AI; it’s what they use it for.
Back in June, I wrote that we should stop judging AI by how much faster it makes us and start by asking better questions. Will it make us safer? Can it do something no human knows how to do yet? And the one I care most about as an educator: will it build human agency?
That last question is harder than it sounds. Handing a task to AI doesn’t automatically weaken you, but it requires real self-awareness, and our instincts work against us.
So, schools can’t leave agency to chance. Students build agency through real work with real stakes; at d.tech we do this explicitly through our d.lab course, our innovation diploma offering, and frequent internship opportunities (over 78% of our seniors complete at least one internship before they graduate).
If we want to judge AI by whether it builds human agency, we need a clear picture of what agency is. We believe it’s built around four dimensions: purposeful identity, adaptability, strategic efficacy, and relational intelligence. These dimensions give students a sharper question to ask every time they open a chatbot: is this helping me grow, or just helping me finish?
Schools are where students should learn to answer that question, and educators, who spend their days thinking about how people grow, are the right ones to lead that conversation.