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Your Programming Students' Cognition with ChatGPT: Higher Performance, Lower Retention, and Reduced Ownership — arXiv:2609.21194

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21194
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-10-10T01:42:37.861Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: 326b156fdcd9628c2c1fb1d838fe07a48d76be8e8dd7d5a0a1e112a1c1b6c04e
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How to cite

Your Programming Students' Cognition with ChatGPT: Higher Performance, Lower Retention, and Reduced Ownership — arXiv:2609.21194 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21194 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_c702ef153dfc (Metraipolis archive dc_c702ef153dfc, sha256 326b156fdcd9628c2c1fb1d838fe07a48d76be8e8dd7d5a0a1e112a1c1b6c04e)

BibTeX

@misc{dcc702ef153dfc,
  title = {Your Programming Students' Cognition with ChatGPT: Higher Performance, Lower Retention, and Reduced Ownership — arXiv:2609.21194},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21194},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_c702ef153dfc; sha256 326b156fdcd9628c2c1fb1d838fe07a48d76be8e8dd7d5a0a1e112a1c1b6c04e},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21194. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

Generative AI can improve students' programming performance, but successful task completion may not reflect what they retain. We examined performance, retention, cognitive load, and ownership in a controlled between-subjects experiment with 59 undergraduate computer science students, 55 were retained for analysis. Participants completed three introductory C programming tasks with access to ChatGPT-4.5 or conventional web search without generative AI. We measured task performance, self-reported mental effort and difficulty, pupillary responses, heart rate variability, and ownership, and assessed cued recall immediately and 48 hours later. ChatGPT-assisted students achieved higher coding scores (89% vs. 69%) but lower recall scores immediately (41% vs. 53%) and after 48 hours (39% vs. 52%). There was no significant difference in the loss of recall information over 48 hours between the groups. Self-reported mental effort increased less across tasks in the ChatGPT condition (Holm-adjusted p = .047), and students attributed less of the submitted code to themselves (45% vs. 81%). Confirmatory physiological tests did not detect significant differences in trajectories between conditions; substantial data loss limits their interpretation. These findings reveal a gap between assisted task performance and subsequent recall and sense of ownership in this setting. They motivate the need for assessment practices and AI learning tools that require students to explain, retrieve, and contribute to the work they submit as active participants in their education.

Tema degli esploratori: governance digitale e beni comuni (retro-catalogo arXiv: annunci del 2026-09-21 in cs.CY).
Categorie arXiv: Computers and Society (cs.CY).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21194 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-10-10T01:08:18.782Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/catchup/cs.CY/2026-09-21?abs=True (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).