wellnessfitpro 
Let me start with an unpopular but now well-worn recommendation: The routine use of grades in every corner of schooling needs to go. For over a century, American education has made grades its primary currency. We talk endlessly about creativity, problem-solving and self-regulation, but what we systematically reward is performance.
Get the grade. Earn the credential. Move on.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest and most powerful tool students have to accomplish that performance goal without having to engage in the pesky task of learning. And it is better at accomplishing it than any tool that has come before. In the age of AI, grades no longer function as an index of what schools and students are meant to accomplish. In the current grade-focused incentive structure, students’ use of AI to perform better while learning less is entirely rational behavior.
You might think that students may still learn even while using AI to get those coveted good grades. Perhaps. But not likely.
There is a gross mismatch between how AI works and how humans learn. Decades of psychology research are unambiguous: Learning requires students to grapple with difficulty, make mistakes and repair their understanding. AI is engineered to eliminate that productive friction instantly and without judgment. For novices still developing foundational skills, it has enormous potential to be quietly corrosive.
Early research is confirming this: AI that’s used for schoolwork can reduce skill acquisition and undermine self-regulation.
Yet 54% of U.S. teens already use AI for homework, according to a recent Pew survey. What is the response from most schools so far? Bans. Policies. Detection software. Two decades as a motivation researcher tells me exactly how that will go: Students will appear compliant, find workarounds, and the school climate will grow more adversarial. Policing never produced genuine learners.
Students thrive when their core psychological needs are met. They need to feel autonomous, that they are pursuing goals that matter to them. They need to feel connected to peers and teachers who care about them.
What should we do? Replace grades as the organizing logic of school and focus on human flourishing. This is not a new recommendation from motivation scholars like me. So, the good news is that we already know how to pursue it.
Motivation research has produced a clear and durable finding: Students thrive when their core psychological needs are met. They need to feel autonomous, that they are pursuing goals that matter to them. They need to feel genuinely competent, not just credentialed. They need to feel connected to peers and teachers who care about them. When schools deliver on those needs, students engage. When schools don’t, students find shortcuts, and AI is a very good one.
This isn’t speculative. Researchers, including those in my own lab, have documented specific instructional approaches that support these needs: meaningful student choice, explanatory rationales that connect content to students’ values, process-oriented feedback, authentic responsiveness to student interests, structures that normalize setbacks, and genuine inclusion. What is core to the many strategies that support motivation and promote human flourishing is a sincere attempt to take the student’s perspective in the design of instruction.
It’s not that complicated — if you want students (really anyone) to put effort into learning, then you must center their interests, goals, values and perspectives so they can endorse doing what is asked of them and, in turn, regulate their own behavior.
Let’s redefine student success to measure what really matters
February 18, 2025
National surveys show many K-12 teachers already use some of these practices. Just a few weeks ago, the Student Power Summit held in Los Angeles brought together a few hundred pioneering district administrators, teachers, students and researchers from across the country to discuss the need for supportive approaches they see as helping students be self-determined in their learning and flourish. Among the most persuasive attendees were the students who came to attest to the benefits they, their peers and their teachers experienced when their schools adopted this approach.
But these educators and students are the exception in U.S. schools, not the rule. Administrative pressure, rigid curriculum pacing, a focus on meeting state or district standards, and embedded misconceptions about how motivation works all make need-supportive approaches uncommon in U.S. schools. In particular, their use drops sharply as students move from elementary into secondary school and beyond, precisely when motivation most needs support.
I know there is plenty of resistance to giving up on grades, and real logistical complications. Grades are efficient shorthand in systems where teachers manage dozens (or hundreds) of students simultaneously. But truthfully, until now, learning has only been an accidental (though convenient) side effect of our grade-focused culture. And AI has the potential to reduce that convenient accidental benefit.
As long as performance is the main goal, AI will be tempting. So, let’s get rid of the temptation to perform rather than learn. A need-supportive classroom doesn’t just reduce the appeal of AI misuse. It addresses why students were reaching for it in the first place: to escape a system that made them feel pressured, controlled and disconnected from any reason to care about learning.
Before AI, schools could sustain the fiction that chasing grades was basically the same as chasing learning. That fiction is gone, and students now have access to a tool that will do the performing for them. The question AI has forced on us is one we should have been asking all along: Are we building credential-holders or thinkers? The answer requires more than a new AI policy. It requires a new theory of what school is for.
That reckoning is overdue. AI has simply made it unavoidable.
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Erika A. Patall is a professor of education and psychology at the Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California.
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