Review of Productive Struggle: How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Learning, Effort, and Youth Development in Education

OCTOBER 21, 2025

Report Asks Important Questions About the Benefits and Risks of AI in Schools, but Its Answers Are Poorly Grounded and Generic

An NEPC Review funded by the Great Lakes Center

Key Takeaway: Bellwether takes a balanced yet overly simplistic approach to evaluating the use of artificial intelligence in schools.

GRAND RAPIDS, MI (OCTOBER 21, 2025) - A recent report from Bellwether considers the role of generative AI (GenAI) in education, posing the question: When does the ease afforded by GenAI enable deeper learning, and when is ease merely a shortcut with hidden costs?

Thomas M. Philip of the University of California, Berkeley reviewed Productive Struggle: How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Learning, Effort, and Youth Development in Educatio n. He found that while the report raises important questions, its analysis is limited.

To explore its central question, the report examines how AI tools interact with students' memory and information processing, attention and engagement, motivation and mindset, and metacognition and self-regulation. However, Professor Philip finds that the report conflates the multiple meanings of "learning," leading to unjustified conclusions about AI's potential impact. In particular, by adopting an overly individualistic lens to learning, the report often overlooks the realities of complex classroom environments, making unfounded inferences about classroom use of AI-powered tools.

Further, the report stops short of offering proactive recommendations to mitigate the known harms of GenAI, particularly for children and youth. As a result, while it highlights important questions that policymakers must consider, the report's usefulness as a guide for decision-making is quite limited.

Find the review, by Thomas M. Philip, at:

https://www.greatlakescenter.org

Find Productive Struggle: How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Learning, Effort, and Youth Development in Education , written by Amy Chen Kulesa, Marisa Mission, Michelle Croft, and Mary K. Wells and published by Bellwether, at:

https://bellwether.org/publications/productive-struggle/

NEPC Reviews ( https://nepc.colorado.edu/reviews ) provide the public, policymakers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. NEPC Reviews are made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice: https://www.greatlakescenter.org .

The mission of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research & Practice is to support and disseminate high-quality research and reviews of research for the purpose of informing education policy and to develop research-based resources for use by those who advocate for education reform.

Visit the Great Lakes Center website at GreatLakesCenter.org

Contacts

Michelle Renee Valladares

Thomas M. Philip