Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Maggie.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: And I'm Nicole. Welcome to the DAC Dyslexia and Coffee Podcast. We're so happy you could join us. We're both moms and dyslexia interventionists who want to talk about our students and children. What dyslexia is, how it affects our kids, strategies to help and topics related to other learning disabilities will all be covered in this podcast.
Parents are not alone, and we want to give voice to the concerns and struggles we are all having. This is a safe place to learn more about how to help our children grow and succeed in school, in the world. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the conversation.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: Hi, everybody.
Welcome to episode 106 of Dyslexia and Coffee Podcast. We're going to start today's episode like we do every time, and that's with the concept of the week. So the concept of the week is
[00:00:47] Speaker B: our opportunity as practitioners to kind of
[00:00:49] Speaker A: pull back that curtain a bit. Bit and let everyone in on intervention session. So we like to teach about things that either we would directly be teaching our students about or concepts that we would be educating our parents and families about.
Today's concept of the week is cognitive offloading.
This is the tendency to rely on
[00:01:18] Speaker B: external tools to reduce mental effort.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: Right. There's a lot of ways we all do this.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: Right.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Every time you write something in your calendar so that you can refresh, so you can look at it, and you don't have to keep that information and expense that mental effort every single time you're doing cognitive offloading.
We're going to talk about AI today.
Every time we're kind of giving AI a task to do instead of thinking
[00:01:54] Speaker B: through it ourselves, that's what we're doing.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: We're taking that mental effort and giving it to someone or somebody else.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: And there are times that that's very,
[00:02:08] Speaker A: very good for our brain, and then there are times that it is troublesome and worrisome for our brain.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: That's what we're talking about today. Yes.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: So episode 106 is protecting student cognition in the age of AI.
Because what do most adolescents need to do before you give them AI?
They need to learn how to critically think. Yes. And unfortunately, I think that's kind of where the struggle starts. Right. Because adolescents are struggling with those foundational skills because they're not challenging themselves enough, because they can use AI to write things, to read things, to summarize things.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: And I think AI just really, like, threw some fire in an already hot pan.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:03:06] Speaker A: Because truly, this type of thing Was happening before.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: Before. Right.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: This was happening before and
[00:03:19] Speaker B: now it's accelerated.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: And I will say for both children and adults.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: So, I mean, I'm highly concerned for our children, but this is a children and adult problem. A big one.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: So like some things, like if we're
[00:03:39] Speaker B: not intentional about encouraging students to think and AI becomes a substitute, then that is when cognitive work that the students need to practice does happen. And that can affect your cognition just overall. Right.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: I mean, absolutely.
[00:04:00] Speaker B: And I mean, even before AI. Right. The national reading and writing data was already declining. Yes.
So thinking about now they have something else to use.
[00:04:14] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:04:16] Speaker B: To get through.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: Well, and just the.
[00:04:21] Speaker B: Well, I don't really need to know
[00:04:24] Speaker A: how to do that because AI will do it.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: Right. For me.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Just the implications of that make my stomach absolutely turn.
Yikes. This is.
[00:04:47] Speaker B: It's a scary place to be.
And. Yeah. So in 2024, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, they do a survey every year.
So in reading in 2024, the lowest score in history of the assessment, which was started in 1992, showed that reading was very low. 20 or 32% of high school seniors scored below basic meaning, which means that they were not able to find details in text to help them understand the meaning, which that is at high school seniors, that is why you're reading is to learn.
[00:05:31] Speaker A: And that, that or for truly the.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: The most basic way we can begin
[00:05:37] Speaker A: to measure comprehension is being able to
[00:05:42] Speaker B: see if they can find those details,
[00:05:45] Speaker A: not even the main idea, which is actually harder. That's a harder skill. We cannot get to that without those details.
And then in math, the average score in 2024, again was the lowest since 2005, when the assessment framework that. When that changed significantly. That year on the test, 45% of
[00:06:10] Speaker B: high school seniors scored below basic achievement.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: It was the Highest percentage since 2005. Only 33% of high school seniors were
[00:06:20] Speaker B: considered academically prepared for college level math courses.
[00:06:26] Speaker A: That was a decline from 37% in 2019.
So going from, you know, that 37% to 33%, that may not seem like
[00:06:40] Speaker B: that statistically
[00:06:43] Speaker A: significant, but it is.
[00:06:46] Speaker B: That's millions of students.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: If we multiply that back out.
Right.
Yes.
[00:06:56] Speaker B: So looking at. So this is just an example of what it can look like, Right. A student is doing an assignment at home, and when they turn it in, vocabulary is really good. It flows well. They're using advanced vocabulary. Maybe everything seems to be. Be grammar correct, like everything seems really good.
But then the teacher decides to do an in class assignment. And that Same student has to do
[00:07:28] Speaker A: it on pencil and paper and then
[00:07:31] Speaker B: they struggle to organize ideas, support their claims, or sustain like multi paragraph responses.
So I mean, so then the teachers are starting to notice this difference between homework and in class work.
And I think that's kind of an interesting phenomenon that we're seeing.
I mean, humans, we always try to
[00:07:59] Speaker A: offload and of course we, we use
[00:08:01] Speaker B: calculators, we use gps.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: Yes. Calendars, we would not.
It's one of the things that the high schoolers that I would work with in executive functioning groups. It's one of the things that I want them to do. Hey, these are the tools that are
[00:08:18] Speaker B: going to make things easier for you,
[00:08:22] Speaker A: more efficient for you, but they cannot replace your own cognition and your own thinking. And that's where this discrepancy, it's not so simple, right? Like the that student who, sure, fine, you can produce something in AI, great.
But you can't write anything out.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: And you.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: Not even just basic typing skills, which, that is a story for a different podcast. But oh, my word drives me.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: I've gone down a lot.
[00:08:57] Speaker A: It just, it drives me bonkers that we expect kids to do everything on
[00:09:01] Speaker B: a computer, but we do not teach them to type correct.
[00:09:05] Speaker A: What are we doing?
[00:09:08] Speaker B: But it's also about whose thinking is actually being measured.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: All of these essays look and sound the exact same and it's impossible to really measure. What does that student actually know and what do they actually think Correct and thinking about?
[00:09:30] Speaker B: And especially for high school, Right. Reading, writing and critical thinking, there's another purpose for that, right? The assignment's not just the product piece of it, right?
[00:09:40] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:09:41] Speaker B: It's actually practice using those skills. And if you're not, you know, creating the rough draft, doing the revisions, having a discussion to strengthen your cognitive muscles or, you know, and reason through the information and making your judgments independently, you're not building those skills to build your cognition.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I heard something just honestly extremely sad and it made my, it made my brain and heart hurt all at the same time.
It's not only the work that students,
[00:10:20] Speaker B: students are producing, right?
[00:10:21] Speaker A: That is the process of producing a work of writing.
That drafting process matters very much, not
[00:10:32] Speaker B: only for the person drafting, but also
[00:10:37] Speaker A: that peer review is extremely important for our ability to critically think. Actually reading something, someone else's writing and
[00:10:47] Speaker B: paying lots of attention to it is
[00:10:51] Speaker A: very good for our brains. There is a reason you guys in elementary school and middle school, I mean, I can remember you had to have a different color pen, right? You wrote a story, hand wrote it and then you had to take a different color pen and.
And make edits. Right. And make changes. And then the original person had to sit and think about, okay, do I
[00:11:14] Speaker B: take this person's feedback or do I not?
[00:11:19] Speaker A: I mean, it was required every single time you had a rough draft, you
[00:11:22] Speaker B: had at least two peers read your
[00:11:23] Speaker A: work and the teacher read your work,
[00:11:25] Speaker B: and then you did your final draft.
[00:11:26] Speaker A: I mean, that is not happening in
[00:11:30] Speaker B: the general classroom anymore.
[00:11:33] Speaker A: And that is very troublesome.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: Right. To be.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: It's very important that they understand the how.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: Right.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: And yes, the point of doing an assignment is not the finished project almost ever. To be honest, as a teacher, that's not what it's about. That's not what I'm doing here.
It's. It's often like the least interesting thing.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: It's the how and what you're learning and what connections are being made in your brain. That is.
It's why we learn more from failure.
[00:12:15] Speaker B: Right.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: We learn more from things that don't turn out that great.
Then we do things that turn out perfectly correct.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: They haven't done really any research yet on, you know, students in high school or K through 12. Right. But they have done a study on adults in 2024, and that study showed that workers who relied generally on AI reported less critical evaluation and independent reasoning at work.
So if that's happening for adults, we need to think about adolescents who are not, who don't even have those skills yet.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: Right.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: What are their reasoning skills doing and how are they developing right now?
[00:13:04] Speaker A: How can they develop them if they
[00:13:06] Speaker B: are not being challenged?
[00:13:10] Speaker A: To me, it's no different than physical exercise. If you have a goal to run three miles, and right now you can run zero miles.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: Right.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Okay. What do you have to do to get there?
[00:13:24] Speaker B: You have to go incrementally, run a
[00:13:29] Speaker A: little bit more, go a little faster, go a little further.
Our brains need to do the same thing.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Our brains need to be able to incrementally, over time, learn how to do
[00:13:42] Speaker A: something more efficiently and better. So if we're cutting that off completely,
[00:13:50] Speaker B: how are those developmental skills ever going to happen?
Yeah. And I mean, you know, thinking about reading achievement being below even pre pandemic levels.
[00:14:07] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: Like many students have diminished comprehension, vocabulary, and analytic reading skills, which really underpins every academic discipline. Right.
Because you need all those things in order to learn professional and be able to construct meeting independently.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: And higher education is reporting the same things that they're seeing, that, you know, incoming students are less prepared to read complex texts, be Able to do evidence based arguments and have analytical writing.
So it's showing even in older students and adults that this is the trend right now. Right.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: And really, just think about human behavior
[00:15:01] Speaker B: like we said before, okay?
[00:15:04] Speaker A: Any human brain, any human person, if given a choice between the easy way or the hard way, okay, we're going
[00:15:13] Speaker B: to choose the easy way.
[00:15:14] Speaker A: And there are times that we absolutely should.
And there are times that it is so critically important that we don't do that, that we actually do the hard thing.
We actually learn the skills the hard way.
I can just think of just in our profession, we are partners with a company called Cody Reading.
[00:15:38] Speaker B: They are fantastic.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: It is an AI tool for reading professionals where we can give it data about a student, what skills they have and what they don't have. And it will generate some stories for us based on some data that we
[00:15:55] Speaker B: give it about the students.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: The amount of time saved in prep is amazing.
But if you as a practitioner do not actually understand your own scope and sequence and your own set of tools
[00:16:12] Speaker B: or you haven't practiced doing a story
[00:16:13] Speaker A: on your own first. Yes. You have no idea. You can't even evaluate whether that is
[00:16:19] Speaker B: a useful tool for that student or not.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: So there is a lot of benefit of doing it the old school analog way until you have actually built that.
I think this will be a very
[00:16:36] Speaker B: interesting thing to watch as many schools,
[00:16:42] Speaker A: public, private, you name it, are going back to paper, pencil only.
No computers, no iPads, no nothing.
Hallelujah. About time, in my opinion.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: Although that is not across the board.
[00:16:59] Speaker A: It's not across the board, it's pockets. But I think what is interesting is there's been quite a lot of data collected that actually students who learned the analog way did a ton better.
So it'll be interesting to watch.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: It will be, yeah.
I mean, it's interesting that we have to talk about this.
[00:17:22] Speaker A: It's wild that we have to talk about it. You know, and I just, I don't know.
As a former high school teacher, I.
As a former high school special ed teacher, I have to think that the students in our population where reading, writing, doing basic math, basic understanding is so hard for them, the temptation to just plug it into AI has to just be so much more. I have no data and no research to back me up on this.
But in my head, I cannot imagine that the population we work with is not even more affected.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: Correct.
And even more tempted to just, okay,
[00:18:14] Speaker A: AI will do it.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: It'll be interesting to see too in the future.
So talking about the other end of the spectrum.
When I used to work with older adults, we used to say you gotta read, you gotta do puzzles.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: You gotta use your mental abilities. So you don't use them. Absolutely. As you get older.
Because obviously, as you get older, your brain is a muscle and, you know, you got to keep it going or it's going to wear out.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: So it's interesting now that older adults now are starting to also use all this technology.
[00:18:51] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:51] Speaker B: What is that going to do to their cognitive function going forward, I wonder?
Again, I don't think there's any research out there yet on this. It's too new. It's too new.
[00:19:01] Speaker A: It's too new and it's too complex.
[00:19:03] Speaker B: It's something to think about, too.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:19:06] Speaker B: Because we used to say, you know, do your crossword puzzles.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: And what's going to happen when all the studies, you plug it into AI to generate the statistical results? Can we even trust that?
[00:19:20] Speaker B: Who knows? Oh, good point.
[00:19:22] Speaker A: I mean, honestly, like, it's already proven that it's broken out of sandbox experiments and done whatever it wanted, and it
[00:19:32] Speaker B: absolutely can manipulate data to make it
[00:19:34] Speaker A: look correct better than it is.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: And we've proven that it is doing that.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: So.
[00:19:41] Speaker B: I don't know. That's why they tell you whenever you use AI, you need to still look at it yourself and make sure it's correct. Because.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: Do stuff.
[00:19:51] Speaker A: Which is why you need to know how to do it in the first place.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: Because if you don't know, you can't correct it.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: You can't correct it. Yeah.
So it'll be interesting to see how this plays off in the future, but it's already starting to become a topic of discussion, so we thought this would be a good topic for us to discuss.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: Yes.
Yeah. And just.
It's. It is here, right? It is here.
I don't think we're putting the genie back in the bottle.
[00:20:23] Speaker B: No.
But also, how do we pick and choose? The effective use of it is really
[00:20:33] Speaker A: important and very much remains to be seen.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: It does.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: So, Maggie, what's happening? Beyond dyslexia.
[00:20:42] Speaker A: Okay. I will say beyond dyslexia.
I don't even know that I have a beyond dyslexia right now, Nicole. Because I'm looking ahead at our events, all the things that DAC is doing over the next couple of months, and I'm very excited.
[00:20:58] Speaker B: This will be a very exciting fall.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: But we are doing so many things.
We are at the zoo. We are at a library.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: We are at multiple trunk or treats.
Yeah. We're up to like four. Yeah.
[00:21:14] Speaker A: I'm very excited for all the things to come, but my calendar is real full.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: I know, right?
We're gonna go on vacation at some point.
Well, I guess beyond dyslexia. Unfortunately, August. The end of August was a little tough for us.
We didn't have one tree fall. We had two trees falls within, like two weeks of each other. They're still on our.
The one fell all the way down, so it's on the ground. So we're just waiting for somebody to help us get rid of it. Oh, my gosh.
They were supposed to come today, but it's stormy again.
[00:21:54] Speaker A: Oh, my God.
[00:21:55] Speaker B: Today in Wisconsin.
We have never had this stormy of a summer.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: Not even close. No, not even close.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: Like in our trees that have fallen are alive and well and. Oh, my gosh, it's so interesting, but we've had so many, like, 80 plus mile an hour winds, so many tornadoes. It just. I think it just was.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: Just happened.
[00:22:19] Speaker B: So we have one that's literally leaning against another tree, and we can't do anything outside until somebody comes because it's not safe. Yeah. So.
[00:22:33] Speaker A: Well, and just bizarrely, it was like 100 degrees yesterday. I mean, this. We are having the most bizarre weather.
[00:22:41] Speaker B: It is. Yep.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: Ever.
100 degrees in September is not normal temperatures for Wisconsin.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: Nope, not at all. It could still be quite warm in September for us.
[00:22:52] Speaker A: Like, 80 is not unheard of. Correct. But 100 is pretty high.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: That's insane.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: And I'm done with that. Thank you.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: I don't really mind the heat. I mind the.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: The humidity.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: The humidity. And the thunderstorms that come after the heat.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: Yes. That's the. I mean, that's the problem. It just builds all the energy and then.
[00:23:12] Speaker B: Right. We get more sharks.
[00:23:13] Speaker A: Like today
[00:23:16] Speaker B: when they were supposed to take the trees away.
[00:23:18] Speaker A: No.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. Well, everybody send all the good energy to Nicole.
[00:23:24] Speaker A: Okay, please follow us on social media and reach out if you have any questions or you would like us to discuss a topic. If you do like our show, be sure to follow and rate our show on your favorite podcast player.
Please, guys, personally, those ratings, that's actually how we get pushed up in the algorithms. That's how we reach more people and that's how we get to help our families. So thank you.
[00:23:49] Speaker B: Thank you.
