Students attributed initial passive reliance on GenAI to prompting paralysis and an authority bias compounded by low academic self-efficacy¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · design r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2026 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Reflective essays indicated students struggled to translate vague intentions into explicit prompts and tended to accept AI outputs perceived as more professional and organized than their own writing. → Deliang Wang and Cunling Bian 2026

Evidence¶

Deliang Wang and Cunling Bian 2026¶

Deliang Wang and Cunling Bian. (2026). Scaffolding Critical Engagement with GenAI: Transforming Ethnic Minority Preparatory Students’ Collaborative Discourse in Prompt Engineering Tasks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28630 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2607.28630

q2 · i? · design · r2

Thematic analysis of students’ reflective essays from Week 3 identified prompting paralysis and epistemic asymmetry as drivers of cognitive offloading; students positioned GenAI as an epistemic authority to be deferred to rather than interrogated, creating a psychological barrier to critical engagement.

"Students explicitlyacknowledged that they tended to accept AI outputs because they perceived them as “more professional and organized” than their own writing, or because, under time pressure, the AI’s responses appeared “good enough.”"

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Self-Efficacy — predictor: learners who differ on it differ in outcomes

Related Claims¶

• Motivational Disengagement, reported by 270 participants, captures reduced initiative and eroding confidence linked to AI reliance — related
• Learners' task-specific self-efficacy beliefs predict whether they initiate, persist through, and recover from difficulty on academic tasks. — a broader claim this one bears on
• Task completion with GenAI is a weak proxy for durable competence, with struggling learners at risk of an illusion of competence — related
• In unguided GenAI collaboration, ethnic minority preparatory students’ strategy talk co-occurred with passive sharing and uncritical acceptance, forming a plan-and-paste loop — related
• An efficiency paradox: well-intentioned students default to passive GenAI processes and experience cognitive laziness and overreliance — related
• Participants' prompting was often limited, with poorly formulated prompts leading to vague or unhelpful outputs — related
• Without explicit guidance and scaffolding, unguided GenAI use may disproportionately benefit already advantaged students and widen performance gaps — related
• Self-efficacy is moderately related to academic achievement but is more a product of past performance than a driver of future performance — related
• Under enduring constraint, disengagement may reflect accurate calibration to low translation fidelity rather than low self-efficacy — related