The Transitional generation
By: Amelia - Teacher, Campus AI Coach, and Co-Founder
I’m still thinking about the story of the college professor who recently caught his students cheating by hiding a directive in their prompt. Most copied the AI output without checking it. It was an indicator that they not only used AI to generate their responses, but failed to make it their own, let alone read it.
This story confirmed something I see every day in the classroom. Very few years separate students who know how to work with AI thoughtfully, versus those who know how to get AI to do something.
Today’s secondary students are a transitional generation.
They started their educational journey before genAI exploded. They are learning while AI is becoming ubiquitous. And they will graduate into a workforce where AI literacy is expected.
To test this, I called my 19-year-old son who is a freshman in college and once I determined that he hadn’t heard about this particular story, I asked him one question.
“If you were going to copy and paste questions from an assignment into AI and after highlighting it you noticed a sentence in white font that asked for a random output, what would you think?”
His immediate response? “I would think the teacher was trying to see who would use AI and who would just paste the output into the assignment without reading it first.”
That’s what I thought.
The fact that almost 100% of this professor’s students did not stop and question the hidden message once they saw it, reveals they aren’t demonstrating critical AI habits. Those post-secondary students didn’t question the prompt, they didn’t evaluate the output, and they do not necessarily recognize when something doesn’t belong.
This story shines a spotlight on the fact that students need to learn what AI is and is not. They need to understand how to use it properly and with unique applicability to various content areas. They have to question the output, and they must find a balance to avoid leaning too heavily on AI because of its speed.
Freshmen entering high school this year will spend the next four years in a world where AI is normal. If schools intentionally teach AI literacy, those students won’t just know how to get an answer, they’ll know how to evaluate one!
So, while higher education is confronting today’s challenge, middle and high schools have the opportunity to prepare students for tomorrow’s.
The next generation of students won't magically become AI literate because they grew up with AI. They will become AI literate only if schools intentionally teach them how to think with it, question it, evaluate it, and use it responsibly.
If we don’t intentionally teach AI literacy now, when will students learn it?
