Jul 13 • Creative Force Dispatch
Creative Force Dispatch
Faster Solutions, Lower Test Scores: How AI Is Eroding Math Skills
RESEARCH-DRIVEN ARTICLE | THE HECHINGER REPORT · JILL BARSHAY | JULY 6, 2026
A doctoral student at UC Irvine teamed up with researchers at McGraw-Hill and did something clever: rather than asking students whether they use AI, they let the data answer. Analyzing millions of interactions with ALEKS — an online math platform used by more than four million students a year, from fifth grade through college — they compared two problem types. Word problems can be pasted straight into a chatbot. Graphing problems can't, not easily. After ChatGPT arrived, the two diverged.
Time spent on word problems fell sharply — down 31 percent among high schoolers — while time on graphing problems held steady. And accuracy on supervised placement tests dropped from roughly 80 percent to about 60 percent, a decline that appeared only on the AI-outsourceable problems and vanished under proctoring. The researchers call the pattern "cognitive surrender." Notably, they don't argue for banning AI; carefully designed AI tutors have improved achievement in controlled experiments precisely because they ask questions and withhold answers, increasing the time a student spends thinking. The ALEKS data show the opposite happening in the wild.
CREATIVE FORCE: If mathematics is a creative force, then the unit of creative work is the interval between encountering a problem and understanding it. That interval is where representation gets built, where a student decides what the words mean before deciding what to do with them. This study is essentially a measurement of that interval collapsing — four minutes to under three, and for some students, to seconds. The finding that should reshape our practice is not "AI is bad." It's that speed and learning came apart, and that the most vulnerable tasks were those requiring translation from language into mathematics, the most creative act in the whole sequence. For anyone designing tasks: the question is no longer whether a problem is hard, but whether it is outsourceable. Graphing problems weren't protected because they were harder. They were protected because they were inconvenient to hand off.
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Can This City Succeed in Having All Eighth Graders Take Algebra Where Others Have Failed?
REPORTED FEATURE | THE HECHINGER REPORT · KATE TAYLOR | JULY 6, 2026
Cambridge, Massachusetts, tried to thread a needle that has snapped in many other districts. Parents wanted their children to accelerate in math; the district wanted to preserve mixed-level, racially integrated classrooms. Rather than tracking students or eliminating eighth-grade algebra altogether — San Francisco's much-litigated approach, since reversed — Cambridge gave algebra to everyone and staffed for it, putting a second teacher (a special educator or math interventionist) in every eighth-grade algebra room, and at one school, enrolling students in Algebra I and regular eighth-grade math simultaneously. After year one, six in ten rising ninth graders will retake algebra. The piece resists an easy verdict, and it's better for it. Teachers describe working hard to draw in students beyond the confident "first talkers." The experiment isn't obviously a failure — it's an honest look at how much scaffolding universal access actually requires, and what it means when a year of exposure doesn't convert into a year of readiness.
CREATIVE FORCE: This is a story about the difference between offering mathematics and making it inhabitable. Access is a policy lever; belonging is a pedagogical one, and the gap between them is where most equity efforts quietly fail. My question is, what is algebra? What are the relevant guiding practices within that domain that would be a utility to a kid? Mathematical creativity is not evenly distributed in a room by default — it is distributed by design, or it isn't distributed at all. For practitioners, Cambridge's real finding may be that acceleration is not a scheduling decision.
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What Is the Positive Grassmannian and Why Does It Show Up Everywhere?
PODCAST INTERVIEW | THE JOY OF WHY (QUANTA) · LAUREN WILLIAMS WITH STEVEN STROGATZ | JUNE 25, 2026 Read it here
Harvard's Lauren Williams walks Steven Strogatz through an object from algebraic combinatorics that has an uncanny habit of turning up where nobody invited it — in particle physics, in the mathematics of shallow water waves, in places that have no business sharing a structure. What makes the conversation worth an hour is less the object than the method: Williams describes a career built on noticing that two things nobody had connected were, on closer inspection, the same thing.
The interview then turns to First Proof, Williams's project to measure — objectively, rather than by press release — how good AI systems actually are at producing proofs of research-level mathematical statements. That leads straight into the question everyone in this community is circling: whether AI will take over mathematics, and what "taking over" would even mean for a discipline whose real work is deciding which questions are worth asking.
CREATIVE FORCE: Williams offers something rarer than a result — a working description of mathematical creativity as it actually feels from the inside. Not solving, but connecting. Not answering questions, but recognizing that two questions were secretly one. That is a teachable disposition, and it is almost entirely absent from how we assess mathematics. We test whether students can execute a procedure; we almost never ask whether they noticed that this problem resembles that one. Pair this episode with the AI research above, and a genuine tension emerges: the machines are getting good at the part we grade, and Williams is describing the part we don't. If mathematics is a creative force, the First Proof question isn't really "can AI prove things?" It's whether we've been mistaking proof-production for the whole of the discipline — and whether our classrooms have made the same mistake.
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