Principal Investigator: Matthew Connelly, Professor of History
Summary: This project is a multi-phase investigation of the impact of Generative AI (GenAI) on undergraduate writing, cognition, and academic culture within Columbia University's University Writing (UW) course. Since Spring 2025, the study has utilized surveys, focus groups, and quasi-randomized controlled trials to explore a growing tension between students' perception of GenAI as a necessary career skill and instructors' (and some students’) concerns regarding cognitive offloading, the erosion of academic trust, and a shift toward formulaic, "voiceless" writing. Interventions aimed at reducing student GenAI usage were apparently ineffective. In the next phase (Fall 2026), the project will shift from documenting attitudes to performing computational text analysis on a large corpus of student essays to determine if GenAI usage narrows linguistic diversity and whether existing grading structures inadvertently reward standardized, AI-influenced prose.