Since ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in November 2022, educators have grappled with how and whether to engage AI for student writing. States, districts, and universities have scrambled to develop AI policies. Anecdotally, I’ve heard from teachers who ban it completely—their students must now write all major assignments by hand, in class—and others who believe that any limits are futile, and therefore they place none at all. Most, of course, fall somewhere in between.
These are tough questions, and doubly so because students haven’t been writing enough since well before the advent of ChatGPT. In a 2022 survey, only 4 percent of English language arts (ELA) teachers reported that their students in grades 3–12 met the expert recommendation of sixty daily writing minutes. Only 31 percent reported their students reaching even half that goal. The findings are consistent with a 2016 survey that found that third and fourth graders spent an average of twenty-five minutes a day writing, as well as national data from 2011, which revealed that only 25 percent of middle schoolers and 31 percent of high schoolers wrote for thirty minutes or more daily.
Trends in assessments and expectations seem to bear out a deemphasis on students’ writing. High school end-of-course exams have reduced writing requirements. As of 2022, for example, Virginia students can substitute the simplistic, low-bar ACT WorkKeys Business Writing test for the state’s longstanding Standards of Learning writing exam. The SAT recently dropped its essay portion (and, long ago, the separate writing test that the essay portion had replaced). Most alarmingly, it’s apparently now acceptable for an English professor to declare that AI can do the work of “learning to write” for students.
We can cite everything from No Child Left Behind to the advent of ChatGPT as a reason for insufficient writing time. But regardless of the catalyst, what’s important is that students at all levels keep writing. Here’s why.
First, learning to write helps students learn to read. And goodness knows students need help with reading. Handwriting letters and words can boost very young readers’ understanding of letter-sound relationships and advance their automaticity in reading words. Later, writing helps with understanding sentence and text structure. If you put sentences or paragraphs together yourself, that builds your understanding of how others are constructing their own sentences and texts. Eventually, the same goes for more sophisticated choices in reading and writing, like style and genre.
Writing also boosts students’ content knowledge and cognitive development. Especially when writing by hand, students are more likely to retain the information they’re writing about—and that’s true across subjects. What’s more, a recent study shows that it’s specifically important for students to write without AI. Not only were students who used AI to craft their essays unable to remember much of what they had written, but also, compared to peers who didn’t use AI, their brain scans revealed less neural activity when it came to creativity, integrating information, and self-monitoring. That aligns with yet more research demonstrating that writing improves analysis and inference skills. We already know that relying on Google Maps is rotting our spatial memories. Relying on AI for writing may well inhibit the development of children’s and adolescents’ brains.
What’s more, a lack of classroom attention to writing tends may create extra harm to the most vulnerable students. Struggling writers—especially those with learning disabilities—need more time for writing practice, and students with initially weaker skills show more gains from writing interventions than their more skilled peers. Explicit instruction around writing strategies benefits all students, but particularly students with disabilities and English learners.
So what can educators and policymakers do?
First, keep students writing, from short tasks (e.g., sentence mechanics practice and concise summaries) to long-form writing (e.g., persuasive essays and personal narratives). They should be writing not only in ELA, but also in social studies, science, art, and music, to improve their writing skills while enhancing their knowledge and reasoning in those subject areas. Writing practice need not come at the expense of content instruction. Writing summaries of or responses to new content, for example, can accomplish both simultaneously. Especially in our age of AI, this may mean more in-class writing and more pen and paper. So be it!
No less crucial, however, is the need to improve teacher training on how to teach writing. There’s ample evidence that teacher preparation programs spend little time on writing pedagogy, and as a result, many educators don’t feel confident in their abilities to teach writing, with teachers in low-income schools feeling even less prepared in this realm than their peers in high-income settings.
I’m not arguing that anyone can or should keep AI out of schools. Not only is it now a fact of life, but it can also offer great tools for differentiating instruction, expediting lesson planning, and even polishing writing. In fact, the same study that found that using AI to write an essay was bad for brain activity also found that using AI after writing an essay actually increased brain activity. We have a lot left to learn, especially with such rapid technological advancement. But what we do know is that we can’t afford to give up on teaching students to write. And that means that we don’t surrender writing instruction to our AI overlords.
