Your students can now generate polished responses, explanations, and solutions in seconds. But a completed answer does not always mean genuine understanding.
Students may recognize familiar material, follow a practiced process, or submit polished work without building the memory, judgment, and problem-solving skills they’ll need later in advanced courses or the workplace. At the same time, activities that require more effort can prompt resistance because students often interpret difficulty as a sign that they are failing or that the assignment is unfair.
This 20-Minute Mentor will show you how to build purposeful challenge into your course without creating unnecessary confusion or frustration. You’ll learn how to use two research-informed desirable difficulty strategies—the generation effect and interleaving—to improve student retention, deepen understanding, and strengthen transfer.
Rather than focusing on AI detection or trying to eliminate generative AI from your course, this program helps you design activities that make student thinking visible. Through simple changes such as pre-questions, incomplete notes, mixed practice, case-based prompts, and AI critique activities, you can require students to retrieve, choose, explain, evaluate, and apply what they know. This program will help you make focused, manageable changes that reduce opportunities for students to outsource their thinking while helping them become more confident, capable, and independent learners.
