Kaitlyn Hughes | news editor

*The article has been updated for accuracy. The name “Julie Hinkle” was spelled as “Julia Hinkle.” The correct spelling is now reflected in the story.

Crystal Paudel will look up from taking notes in class and notice that her peers are on their phones or laptops not paying attention to the professor.

“It makes me a little sad,” said the freshman nursing major. “I think people forget the fact we’re paying a lot of money to be here, and they aren’t getting the full learning experience out of it.”

Some Duquesne professors have seen the classroom change over the years as a result of artificial intelligence, social media and legislation. But they have found new ways to adapt their lessons to this generational shift in learning.

Matthew Ussia, associate professor and director of first year writing at Duquesne, said getting students to do the reading and participate in class is not a new issue. He said digital distractions or working a job keep students from fully engaging.

Ussia said he constantly emphasizes to students that they are learning skills that can be used in other classes and at the professional level.

“Learning is only meaningful if the student sees it as part of an activity system and as part of some meaningful task,” Ussia said.

Associate professor in the School of Nursing Julie Hinkle said there has been a generational shift in people not reading over her 30-year career in education. She said that students prefer learning from videos more than reading the assigned textbooks.

With the continued rapid development and increased use of generative AI, she said professors need to push themselves to think about the purpose of their assignments.

“If it can be done easier and better with AI, then is your student going to be able to get what you want out of the assignment?” Hinkle said. “I just think as educators, it’s our responsibility to figure out how to use the tools that are in front of us … so we can best help them navigate, and ultimately, to teach them how to learn all the time.”

Kelly Arenson, associate professor of philosophy at Duquesne who has been teaching since 2009, is trying to incorporate new technology such as generative AI into her classes.

In her Ethics in Technology class, students were allowed to use a large language model such as ChatGPT or Gemini to create an argument about whether it is moral or not moral to use a large language model to write a paper for a college class. Then, the students had to hand write the opposite argument and comment on whether or not the large language model was a better thinker and writer than they were.

“I think there is a way to use the technology to help us learn. It’s not evil in itself,” Arenson said. “It just has to be used properly.”

Greg Barnhisel, professor of English, said this year he began to see more and more usage of AI in students’ responses on assignments.

To remedy this, Barnhisel bought spiral notebooks for every single student. All the students are required to take any notes in class or at home in the spiral notebook. They are allowed to use it for quizzes.

He said that students often feel like reading and taking notes is busy work, but it is actually a way to use those ideas in different contexts.

“If you haven’t been exposed to those ideas because you had AI answer the questions for you, or do the reading for you, then you can’t apply those ideas to other things,” Barnhisel said. “I think it makes it very difficult for students to exercise their critical thinking skills when they outsource it.”

Danielle St. Hilaire, associate professor and chair of the English Department at Duquesne, said the shift in students’ reading habits has been “a long time coming” and is not just a result of AI or online learning during the pandemic.

She said she thinks students are not reading as much partly because of No Child Left Behind Act 0f 2001, which was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. The 2001 act established yearly testing of student performance, state standards for yearly progress, eligibility requirements for school-wide programs and more.

“That focus on exam scores as a way to determine funding for schools … That shifted priorities toward the kinds of reading and writing activities that happen,” St. Hilaire said. “I think the teaching of novels in particular has diminished substantially in curricula in the country.”

She and her fellow faculty members get more complaints about the lengths of text now than they did 10 years ago, so they have reduced the amount of assigned reading.

“One of the things about the way knowledge and learning and understanding work is that the more you know, the more you can know,” she said. “So we’re not able to help our students get the same breadth of knowledge that they might have been able to get 15 years ago.”

Kaitlyn Hughes can be reached at hughesk10@duq.edu