- Posted on 9 Mar 2026
As AI rapidly enters classrooms, education researchers say Australia must act now to prevent students from losing key cognitive skills essential to learning and development.
Co‑authored by Professor Leslie Loble AM from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Professor Jason Lodge from the University of Queensland, Artificial intelligence, cognitive offloading and implications for education argues that AI can deepen learning – but only if governments move quickly to adopt draft national standards for safe, educationally sound tools and equip teachers to guide their use.
Released by the Australian Network for Quality Digital Education, the report outlines the need for a strong pedagogical response that supports students to offload lower-order tasks to AI while building self-regulated learning capability and critical thinking skills that will help students understand and evaluate complex content.
Professor Loble, the Network’s Chair and an Industry Professor at the UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion, said AI brought with it a significant risk for students who outsource too much cognitive work crucial to establishing their knowledge, skills and “thinking infrastructure”.
“The cognitive offloading from human to AI is especially risky for school students, who are building the foundational knowledge and skills that enable both schooling and lifelong capacity for learning and understanding,” said Professor Loble, who is also former chair of the Australian Education Ministerial Council’s Schooling Policy Group and former Deputy Secretary in the NSW Department of Education.
The educational imperative is not to protect students from a world where AI is the norm, but to prepare them for it. Young people need strong knowledge foundations and complex reasoning skills – not just the ability to ‘Google it’ or outsource the thinking to AI.
“We know students are already using AI extensively, so we can’t put this policy challenge in the ‘too hard’ basket as we did until recently with social media. The issue isn’t whether AI exists in classrooms, but whether it is being used to strengthen learning and help students become more effective thinkers.
“The decisions we make now will determine whether AI deepens students’ knowledge and critical thinking, or instead hollows out the learning process and causes long-term harm to their cognitive development. AI’s propensity for error and hallucination makes it even more essential that students build deep knowledge and strong analytical skills. Teachers are a crucial part of the solution.”
The report identifies two critical leverage points for improving learning with AI:
- Designing AI tools for schools that foster learning, not replace it. This means tools should promote cognitive engagement, deeper thinking and the development of foundational knowledge, not simply generate answers.
- Giving teachers clear guidance, strategies and evidence-based resources to deploy AI effectively. Teachers remain the most important factor in student learning. With the right support, they can help students use AI to extend their thinking rather than outsource it.
Cognitive psychologist Professor Lodge said a growing body of evidence showed that using AI can introduce serious risks for school students.
“School years are critical for building the memory stores and cognitive foundations that last a lifetime,” he said. “If we allow AI to replace that process for some students, we risk creating a learning divide that will be very hard to close. Further investment in research to understand these mechanisms is crucial.
“While unstructured use of AI risks cognitive atrophy, humans still learn more effectively from and with other humans. By supporting the teacher, we empower the human expert who is best placed to manage the complex, relational work of co-regulating learning, managing cognitive load, and building the evaluative judgement, self-regulated learning, and metacognition that students need.
“Additionally, AI will almost certainly widen existing equity divides and mean a widening learning gap for disadvantaged students and schools if left unstructured.
“Students who already possess high levels of domain knowledge and strong metacognitive skills will be able to leverage AI for beneficial offloading and accelerate their learning, while students without these skills, often those already experiencing disadvantage, will be susceptible to detrimental offloading and bypassing the very learning they need. This further underlines the importance of giving support to teachers.”
The Australian Network for Quality Digital Education brings together leaders from across education, industry, social purpose and philanthropic organisations, government and research, in the common purpose of ensuring that all Australian students benefit from the best educational technology (edtech), and the benefits of edtech are leveraged to tackle the persistent learning divide.
The Network is being convened with inaugural funding from the Paul Ramsay Foundation and sponsored by Amy Persson, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Social Justice and Inclusion) at UTS.