7 Automated Aid or Offloading Close Reading? Student Perspectives on AI Reading Assistants

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Introduction

AI Reading Partners—A New Era of Augmented Comprehension

In Spring 2023, I piloted Explainpaper and a similar tool, SciSpace, in several first-year writing courses at the University of Mississippi to explore the impact AI-assisted reading might have on students. Instead of assigning the app to students without instruction, I adopted a careful curriculum integration through a scaffolded framework to offer students pragmatic opportunities and ethical considerations for using generative AI tools to augment their learning (Watkins, 2023). The goal was to help students develop their own AI literacy and consider what implications this technology has for their learning (Bali 2023).

Integrating AI into the Classroom—A Thoughtful Approach

Figure 1: Assignment Overview

Assignment Overview:

Explainpaper and SciSpace are AI reading assistants that help you understand academic papers. To use it, upload a PDF of the paper you want to understand better to each interface. The AI will read and analyze the full text. Then you can have a conversation with the AI assistant to ask questions about concepts, terms, themes, and how different sections relate to each other and the overall arguments or themes in the paper. The AI reading assistants leverage the power of generative AI to understand your questions and provide clear explanations tailored to the content of the specific paper you uploaded. This makes it easier to grasp difficult material and see connections between ideas when reading complex papers. Sign up for a free account using your university email, then download a paper (must be a PDF). Once you’ve downloaded a PDF, you then need to upload it to one of the AI reading assistants and follow instructions.

Directions:

Neil Postman’s “The Judgement of Thamus” can be challenging to read. It has terms used within the essay that are unfamiliar and concepts that might be equally challenging to explore to many maturing writers. This exercise invites you to download the essay, then create a free account with Explainpaper or SciSpace, AI reading assistants, and use one of the apps to help you explore the essay. Once you have used the app to help you read the essay, respond to some of the reflection questions below.

Reflection Questions:

How did the AI reading assistant impact your engagement with and motivation to read the essay? Did the technology make the reading experience more enjoyable or interesting? Why or why not? Consider what was offloaded to the AI and what you had to learn or understand independently. How did this division of labor between human and machine affect your learning process? Do you feel more inclined to rely on technology for comprehension in the future? What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of this dependency? How did using the AI reading assistant affect your ability to analyze and critique academic papers? Consider whether the technology helped develop these skills or if it overshadowed your analytical process. How did the AI app enhance my understanding of the difficult PDF I was reading? What were some of the key features of the AI app that made it easy for me to read and comprehend the PDF? Did the AI app provide additional resources or contextual information that helped me better understand the content of the PDF? Did the AI app help me to focus and stay engaged with the challenging content of the PDF? Why or why not? Did using the AI app change the way I typically approach reading difficult material? What was my overall experience using the AI app, and how would I rate its effectiveness? Did the AI app help me to retain more information from the PDF than I typically would have? Do I see myself using an AI app in future reading activities? Did the AI  app help to reduce the stress and anxiety associated with reading difficult material? Why or why not? Would I recommend an AI app to others who struggle with reading and understanding complex PDFs

Through Students’ Eyes—Revelations from AI-Assisted Reading

AI reading assistants like Explainpaper and SciSpace made challenging academic readings more accessible to students. Many students appreciated how the AI apps reworded confusing sections into plain language, making dense readings more accessible. As one student reflected, “Papers written by someone from a long time ago use words that are harder for our generation to understand. The AI puts the text into a ‘language’ or ‘words’ we use.” The AI explanations helped them grasp the meanings of challenging vocabulary and complex passages that they would have normally struggled with. Another student said, “The best part of these AI websites, such as Explainpaper, is that they allow you to highlight confusing passages of the paper, giving you a summary in an easier-to-read format.” This simpler language and comprehension support enabled students to understand readings many otherwise would have found inaccessible. As one student put it, “For harsh words, it would change it to an easier-to-understand vocabulary.” Overall, the AI reading assistants made challenging textual analysis more accessible by explaining complex language in simpler terms.

Students also felt they absorbed and retained more from the readings when the AI reading assistants summarized key points and explained concepts. As one student wrote, “I definitely think that the AI app helped me to retain more information than I would have normally.” The summarization feature was critical, with one student stating “It then told me exactly what was going on, who Thamus was and what the story was about which I actually blew my mind.” Another said, “It helped me get a quicker understanding of what I was reading.” The AI assistants helped focus their reading and cut down on time some students spent on rereading dense sections. A student reflected, “The text that I highlighted was presented to me in a new way that made it possible for me to understand. In the past, I was never given that opportunity. In the future, I intend to use this AI as a way to enhance my learning. As students, there is no reason we should be penalized for being assigned very difficult reading. This AI helps fight that issue.” This feeling was generally expressed among most of the first-year writing students.

The interactive features, like highlighting text to get AI explanations, helped keep students engaged with the material instead of losing focus. One student wrote, “It helped me stay focused because I was starting to understand what I was reading, and it was making sense.” The process of dialoguing with the text also helped augment close reading. Another student said, “Being able to highlight important concepts and questions reduced stress significantly, as I could focus on the most important parts of the reading.” Rather than feeling lost, many students felt like using the AI reading assistants as a conversation partner helped guide students. One student emphasized, “While using this app, I stopped at words to get help on the definitions which I would not normally take the time to do.”

Students found the AI reading assistants decreased anxiety and stress around reading incomprehensible material, a valuable and often overlooked aspect of reader engagement. The assistants supported their reading comprehension, allowing them to understand readings they’d normally struggle with. A student confided, “I have always struggled with reading comprehension because of my learning disabilities so using an app that analyzes a paper is very helpful for me. The process of shortening down a reading into an understandable paragraph definitely helped me understand the main claims of each section of the reading.” Another student added, “This helped me stay calm and collected and actually understand the difficult text I was reading.” And another student added that the AI tool “reduced much of the anxiety that comes with reading something so labyrinthine.” The tools gave students confidence to tackle complex readings: “Using SciSpace changed how I would typically approach reading, especially with a historical article, because it has finally allowed me to understand what I am reading.”

Students said the AI tools changed their typical reading approach to be more focused and methodical. The assistants guided them to analyze passages more carefully. A student wrote, “Using the AI changed how I would typically approach reading, especially with a historical article, because it has finally allowed me to understand what I am reading.” Rather than skimming or giving up on confusing sections, the tools required close interaction with the text: “I approached my reading method and process differently when using this AI tool.” Another said, “It made it a lot easier for me to recognize the theme of technology changing the world around us.” Yet another student offered the following, “The AI made it much easier for me to stay focused and engaged with the PDF. It helped me stay focused because it made it so much easier to understand, so I wasn’t having to decipher what it was saying all on my own which typically causes me to lose focus. It was also a lot easier to engage with the writing because the AI broke it down into pieces and gave extra information, therefore allowing me to more easily connect it to my life now or the world around me.”

Most students found ongoing value in the AI tools for handling challenging college-level readings. They planned to use the assistants for complex texts in the future. As one student reflected, “I will more than likely use AI to better my understanding.” Another said, “I could definitely see myself using these apps in the future since it did help reduce my anxiety.” The tools changed their outlook on comprehending difficult material. One student stated, “This new AI app has definitely changed the way I go about reading difficult information.” Given the benefits for concentration, comprehension, and engagement, students saw AI reading assistants as a crucial support for college academic reading.

To Automate or Not?—Implications of Offloading Core Skills

Students loved the apps, yes, but what does generative AI assistance suggest for reading? As an educator, many of the responses I saw from students gave me pause to consider the implications of wide-spread adoption of AI-assistance. Clearly, students with reading comprehension and learning disabilities recognized tangible benefits from using the app to augment their reading experience; however, many other students appeared to equate the offloading of reading a challenging article as an affordance of this technology. This worries me. One of the primary skills I try to teach my students is close reading. If we collectively start offloading such skills to generative AI systems, what then will that mean for developing the critical analysis and argumentation skills that are crucial for academic success? But perhaps there is a happy medium between the two. I settled on asking my students to use AI assistance to help them read only when they reached a pain point in their assigned text, where they would have stopped or skipped passages.

Moving Forward Mindfully with AI in Education

As educators, we must thoughtfully integrate AI reading assistants in a measured way that aids comprehension while ensuring students develop core skills like close reading. My study reveals AI can augment learning but not replace foundational competencies. With care and tailored integration, we can realize the promise of AI to provide reading aid while building the human skills we value in education. This will require complex conversations and reflection to align use of generative technologies with our learning goals. But such dialogue will only strengthen education in the AI age.

In conversation with students after the assignment, I asked them some pointed questions about what it might mean for their future learning or careers if they employed such a tool each day. Many were delighted at the prospect at not having to read for school or work, but when I asked them what their response would be if I used a reading assistant to offload the process of reading an assignment they submitted, or if their employer did the same, many students began to put the short term affordances of offloading reading into the greater context of why reading is a foundational skill for our world. Some pushed back at this notion, saying AI is no different than any other tool and why shouldn’t they use it all the time if it is available. I wish I could tell you that I picked up my favorite book and read passionately from a passage as a response, but in truth I understand where students are coming from. They weren’t reading for enjoyment or pleasure—reading in this context for them was a utilitarian act (Kirschenbaum, 2023), a labor, a means to complete an assignment to reach their desired ends—a successful grade. I find that dichotomy present in nearly every conversation about using generative AI in education—learning has been reduced to a problem and here is a technological solution to help solve it. Now that generative AI technologies are commonplace, educators are going to need to fundamentally examine and articulate the importance of human skills and the value they have. Otherwise, many of our students will simply adopt the tools uncritically as solutions and stand-ins for many of the core skills we associate with learning.

 

 

References

AI chat for scientific PDFs | SciSpace. (n.d.). https://typeset.io/

Bali, M. (2023, April 2). What I mean when I say critical AI literacy. Reflecting Allowed. https://blog.mahabali.me/educational-technology-2/what-i-mean-when-i-say-critical-ai-literacy/

Explainpaper. (n.d.). https://www.explainpaper.com/

Kirschenbaum, M. (2023, March 8). Prepare for the textpocalypse. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/ai-chatgpt-writing-language-models/673318/

Watkins, M. (2023). AI in first year writing courses. In A. Vee, T. Laquintano, & C. Schnitzler (Eds.), TextGenEd: Teaching with text generation technologies. The WAC Clearinghouse. https://wac.colostate.edu/repository/collections/textgened/ethical-considerations/ai-in-first-year-writing-courses/