Students' Use of AI Report

 A  nationally representative survey of more than 1,000 teenagers indicated that 72 percent of teens have used AI as companions at least once, while 21 percent use them as companions a few times per week, and 13 percent use them daily. While almost half of survey respondents (46 percent) said they view AI as tools or programs, 33 percent said they use them for social interaction and relationships, 18 percent said they use them for conversation or social practice, 12 percent said they use them for emotional or mental health support, and another 12 percent said they use them for role-playing or imaginative scenarios (multiple responses to the question were allowed). But even AI chatbots specifically designed for mental health therapy—in which these types of safeguards should be baked in—currently may not be much better suited to the task than an all-purpose bot such as ChatGPT. AI demonstrated increased stigma toward certain mental health conditions, including schizophrenia, compared to other conditions such as depression, which could lead people with those stigmatized conditions to stop seeking therapy altogether. (excerpted from School Library Journal)

The Dawn of the AI Era: Teens, Parents, and the Adoption of Generative AI at Home and School. (2025). Common Sense Media. 

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/press-releases/new-report-shows-students-are-embracing-artificial-intelligence-despite-lack-of-parent-awareness-and

AI in school report

 

A recent global report examined students, schooling, and artificial intelligence. It is not a tool guide. It is not a classroom how-to. It is a warning, and a call to professional responsibility. The report concluded that under current conditions, the risks of AI in education outweigh the benefits. 

Brookings organizes its recommendations around three pillars that assume active educator involvement:

• Prosper: Use AI only when it strengthens learning rather than replacing effort, struggle, or sense-making.

• Prepare: Build AI literacy that includes limitations, bias, data use, and appropriate non-use.

Protect: Prioritize student privacy, emotional well-being, cognitive development, and safety through intentional design and governance.

Burns, M. et al. (2026). A new direction for students an an AI world: Prosper, prepare, protect. Brookings. 

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-new-direction-for-students-in-an-ai-world-prosper-prepare-protect/

Search tools strategies study

A recent comparative analysis of four widely used AI-enabled research discovery tools — Elicit, Typeset.io (SciSpace), Consensus, and Scite.ai — lookedat how they perform across different types of research queries and discovery contexts. The results make one thing clear: traditional keyword search remains superior for exactness. Image-based discovery remains largely unsupported. Perhaps most frustrating for experienced researchers is the loss of control. In traditional systems, a poorly performing query can usually be debugged: terms can be adjusted, fields constrained, logic refined. In AI-driven systems, failures are harder to diagnose. AI systems are particularly effective at summarizing bodies of literature, identifying themes, and synthesizing evidence across multiple papers. AI tools excel when the task involves interpretation, synthesis, or sense-making areas where traditional keyword search has always been weakest. The results suggest not a clean replacement of keywords, but the emergence of a hybrid future in which precision search and AI-driven synthesis coexist, sometimes uneasily. The most effective discovery environments will be hybrid systems that combine: Natural language interfaces for exploration and synthesis, keyword and metadata controls for precision and verification, and transparent signals that help users assess confidence and coverage. (excerpted from article below)

Hong Zhou and Hiba Bishtawi. (2026). Keywords re not dead but discovery is no long just research. Scholarly Kitchen.  (2026). https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/01/06/keywords-are-not-dead-but-discovery-is-no-longer-just-search/

Journalism Study

 According to a recent report, “‘Biased,’ ‘Boring’ and ‘Bad’: Unpacking perceptions of news media and journalism among U.S. teens,” released in November 2025, 45 percent of teens said that journalists do more harm to democracy than protect it.

Biased, boring’ and ‘bad’: Unpacking perceptions of news media and journalism among U.S. teens. (2025).  News Literacy Project. https://newslit.org/news-and-research/teens-and-news-media/

Screen Time Impact Study

 

In a review of 132 previous studies involving tens of thousands kids, researchers found that excessive screen use was linked to social-emotional problems and that social-emotional problems also led to more screen use. However, moderate amounts of screen time had minimal impacts. However, using screens for gaming was associated with significantly more negative mental health outcomes.

Vasconcellos, R. P., et al. (2025). Electronic screen use and children’s socioemotional problems: A systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 151(5), 513–543. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000468

Social Media Brain Impact Study

 

A recent study shows that preteens who use social media more frequently perform worse on reading, vocabulary and memory tests than those who use it less. The study, which used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, found that even low levels of social media use can negatively affect cognitive abilities.

Nagata JM, Wong JH, Kim KE, et al. Social Media Use Trajectories and Cognitive Performance in Adolescents. JAMA. 2025;334(21):1948–1950. doi:10.1001/jama.2025.16613

Brain Activity Using ChatGPT study

Recent research from MIT scientists compared the brain activity of students who used ChatGPT when writing to those who did not. The team's findings suggest that using ChatGPT resulted in less brain activity and inferior writing for students. However, they didn't find any brain rot.

Kosmyna, N. et al. (2025).Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task. ArXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872