The Effortless Trap: Productive Struggle, AI, and the Illusion of Learning

With AI advancing fast, educators face a dilemma: ban it or allow it.
Evidence that it both helps and hurts learning only deepens the
confusion. Placement and pacing make all the difference: used well, AI
becomes a personalized tutor that never runs out of patience, putting
real power in educators' hands and stronger tools in students' minds.
Used wrong, it creates only an illusion of learning. The paper gives a
simple map for that choice: a new idea is learned through six moves
(Prime, Probe, Point, Attach, Strengthen, Test); AI must stay out of the
first hard attempt and the final unaided check, and is welcomed as
guarded scaffolding in between. One diagnostic carries the whole frame:
if letting AI in makes the task feel effortless, it is in the wrong place.