We’re doing a lot of reading and thinking right now about the new generative technologies impacting the work of staff and students across Higher Education. This is the third of a series of short posts that aim to highlight a piece that we’ve found in some way thought-provoking, and our response(s) to it. Obviously, things are changing apace, and we want to emphasise that our thinking is also in development, always subject to fluctuation and new influences as we continue to learn – just as it should be!

We’ve been reading about a pilot study recently published with the intriguing title “Reading at University in the time of GenAI.” It caught our attention because so much of what we’ve read has been focussed on student use of GenAI for writing, and we’ve seen relatively little discussion about how it might impact approaches to reading. The study found that many of the Philosophy students surveyed used GenAI tools to provide a way into academic reading “in response to time constraints and conceptual difficulties.” They also found that some groups of students were using these tools to assist with readings more than others – for instance, where they were facing linguistic or disciplinary (i.e. they were coming from a different discipline) challenges.

           This study identifies patterns in the use of GenAI among the students surveyed, but the impacts of this shift in how students learn independently are yet to be established. This subject area, like everything GenAI, is only just starting to be explored and so the available knowledge base is smaller here than in some more proven research areas. The authors of the paper acknowledge that use of the tools for this purpose could be beneficial in “providing alternative entry points to challenging texts,” but also express a concern that “over-reliance on AI-generated summaries could potentially impede the development of critical reading and interpretive skills” (Corbin et al., 2024: 6). That there is such a marked difference in how much they are used by certain groups of students has, as the authors point out, “important implications for educational equity” (Corbin et al., 2024: 6).

Something else that struck us about this paper was its results suggesting that, among these students at least, use of AI for engaging with readings is considerably more common than a feeling of trust in GenAI tools – 17.8% strongly agreed with “GenAI tools improve my understanding of the topic” whereas only 3% strongly agreed with “I trust GenAI,” suggesting that there may be a tension for some students between finding usefulness in creating GenAI summaries and their faith in the tool to reliably produce outputs helpful for their understanding. While it’s not yet possible to draw any wide-ranging and concrete conclusions on this emerging topic, it feels valuable to us as a team to keep track of new research in this area so it can inform the sorts of considerations we discuss with the teaching staff we support.

After a bit of pondering and discussion, what we take from this paper as a team is:

  • An increased awareness of different kinds of student use of GenAI for studies beyond the writing of assessment submissions,
  • A new area of emerging research to monitor, in the form of how uneven use across the student population might impact educational equity, as well as
  • An indication that some students don’t necessarily experience a straightforward relationship with the GenAI tools they turn to for study assistance.

Corbin,  T., Liang,  Y.,  Bearman,  M.,  Fawns,  T.,  Flenady,  G., Formosa, P., McKnight, L., Reynolds, J., & Walton, J. (2024). Reading at university in the time of GenAI. Learning Letters, 3, Article 35. https://doi.org/10.59453/ll.v3.35

Author: Rosemary Pearce

Learning Development Manager

Learning and Teaching Support Unit (LTSU)
School of Arts and Humanities
Nottingham Trent University