I’m quite taken with the concept of ‘metacognitive laziness‘ (even if I don’t like the term). It refers to a disposition to avoid difficulty, drawing on short-term assistance of AI in superficial ways rather than engaging in the metacognitive work prompted by challenges in learning. As I summarised it a few days ago:
The experience of difficulty activates metacognition. If the students cognitively outsource in increasingly habitual ways, it doesn’t just mean they lose the learning involved in what they are outsourcing. It means they lose their capacity to tolerate difficulty, as well to respond metacognitively to that difficulty. This points to the assumption which many educators have that there is something
How is this process mediated by group work? My sense is that it can be amplified by group dynamics or mitigated by them. The group can make it easier to sit with uncertainty by establishing that other people feel a similar anxiety in the face of uncertainty. But the group can also make it harder to sit with uncertainty if it’s defined by competitive dynamics or pluralistic ignorance.
Existing conceptualisations of how students engage with models are deeply individualised. The problem is not taking the individual as a unit of action, it’s remaining there in a way that stops us teasing out how these individual user-model dynamics are shaped by the social context in which students encounter task, enact them and talk about what they’ve done.
Mark Carrigan 