A THREAT TO LEARNING?
Sneha Chakravarty and Anveshna Srivastava are worried about the way learners are ‘outsourcing’ their thinking, so building up an unhealthy ‘cognitive debt’.
“I studied everything, but I still got lower grades on the test!”
“I don’t know where I went wrong.”
“I thought I understood it until I had to explain it.”
The cognitive debt
If you have heard such statements from your students, then you are not alone. These are not just complaints, but clues. Clues that indicate learners are trying but unable to engage with their learning holistically and effectively. Of course, there is nothing particularly new in this, but things might be about to get worse with a deepening cognitive debt emerging arising from the use of AI companions.
Cognitive debt accumulates when we take shortcuts, consume information without processing it, and rely on tools that do the thinking for us, bypassing the path of struggle that was once the default mode for learning. Cognitive debt builds up slowly, leading to shallow comprehension and a reduced ability to make connections between ideas, silently weakening cognitive independence. A recent study (Kosmyna et al., 2025) with adult students found that the people who used large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to support their writing, exhibited low performance across neural, linguistic, and behavioral domains. What should worry us even more is that these students struggled to recall their own phrases, and their language became more uniform and less diverse.
In a world where thinking is increasingly being outsourced to digital tools, students are at risk of losing not only the ability to think through and connect diverse concepts but also the motivation to deeply engage with content.
Being cognitively present
Having identified the risks associated with an individual’s cognitive debt, how might we adjust our teaching to address what seems to be becoming a serious problem.?
Firstly, we must reaffirm our confidence to insist that students constructively engage with the content and methodology of academic disciplines. The sciences, for example, require an understanding and practice of the scientific method, which involves hypothesizing, designing experiments, testing, analyzing data, and interpreting the results.
Engaging with history requires investigating, analyzing, and interpreting past events, establishing a chronology, and weighing evidence while considering inherent biases in the evidence. It is only when learners are cognitively present during these learning steps that deep understanding develops.
Metacognitive strategy
Cognitive engagement facilitates the second essential element required to help learners avoid the cognitive debt: the reflective process of metacognition, which is now becoming, if anything, even more important than ever.
Ideas about metacognition, or ‘thinking about thinking’ often traced back to the work of J. H. Flavell in the 1970s are now widely accepted as crucial in helping learners monitor and adjust their learning approaches, in turn deepening engagement. It is also now an essential practice if students are to avoid the cognitive debt that threatens them if their thinking is ‘out-sourced’.
That said, finding time to go the extra mile from cognition to the abstract world of metacognition is hard! However, given the surge in cognitively indebted learners, there’s no way out except to encourage learners to adapt a ‘slow’ life and help them engage with their own thinking, both cognitively and metacognitively.
The ‘slow’ life: a mantra for deep learning
Metacognitive strategies, when thoughtfully woven into pedagogy encourage students to pause, reflect, plan and evaluate their thinking, fostering a sense of honesty and academic independence, whereby students take ownership of their learning and avoid the problem of the cognitive debt.
The metacognitive habit
Bearing in mind the constraints of time, strategies need to be easy and repeatable. Simple reflective habits, such as pausing to ask –“What strategy worked for me today?” or “What was challenging about this task and how did I manage it?”- help learners move away from a cycle of fast-paced, passive ‘problem-solving’. Of course, this approach can be particularly effective in class, when students have tried different solutions to a problem. Just reflecting as a group on what worked well, what didn’t, and how they might approach it differently also helps reduce the fear of failure and breaks the pattern of rushing through work for the sake of completion. Similarly, reflecting on how they approach a task, rather than just focusing on whether they got it right, can scaffold a learning mindset.
In collaborative tasks, students might be asked to describe how they resolved their disagreements within the group or what they learned from their peers’ approaches. Such prompts help shift the focus from the product to the process of learning.
And, of course, these approaches can also be developed online. Metacognitive prompts like ‘What do I already know about this topic?’, ‘How will I know if my strategy is working?’, ‘Where did I feel stuck, and what helped me move forward?’- can also be embedded using digital tools like Mentimeter, Padlet, Miro board, or Google Forms as entry or exit tickets. Learners’ responses to these prompts can give insights into their thinking process.
Resisting the shortcut culture
In a learning culture increasingly threatened by outsourced thinking, active cognitive engagement followed by metacognitive questioning together serve as powerful tools of resistance to the ‘shortcut culture’, putting ‘thinking’ back at the center of learning and empowering learners to build authentic and enduring knowledge.
- Dr. Sneha Chakravarty is a biology facilitator at 21K School, a fully online school based out of Bengaluru, India. Sneha is a passionate educator and uses an inquiry-reflective teaching approach, which helps create learning spaces for students to explore, question, and connect science to everyday life.
- Anveshna Srivastava is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. Her research focuses on cognition, learning, and innovation in pedagogy.
REFERENCES:
- Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive–developmental inquiry. American psychologist, 34(10), 906.
- Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X. H., Beresnitzky, A. V., … & Maes, P. (2025). Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an ai assistant for essay writing task. arXiv preprint arXiv: 2506.08872.
FEATURE IMAGE: by Chen from Pixabay
Support Images: by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay & Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
Graphic: kindly provided by Sneha Chakravarty and Anveshna Srivastava
