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Mcgraw Hill, Inc. expands ai-powered study and student engagement tools for higher education. Published on 10/16/2026 at 02:20 pm EDT S&P Capital IQ McGraw Hill, Inc. expanded its AI-powered offerings for higher education with new capabilities designed to deliver more precise, personalized study support, while helping instructors foster participation and support deeper learning. New capabilities in McGraw Hill?s Connect(R) digital course solution give students the ability to access trusted AI-generated study resources, while a partnership with Breakout Learning gives instructors new ways to foster student discussion and provide real-time feedback at scale. Expanded AI capabilities in Connect, McGraw Hill?s digital learning and course management solution for higher education, allow students to access AI-generated study materials grounded in their assigned McGraw Hill course content. The features, available for select courses, include text summaries, audio podcasts, chapter overviews, lists of key terms and ungraded knowledge checks designed to reinforce understanding and help students prepare for class, assignments and exams in the format that helps them learn most effectively. The text summaries can also incorporate notes students take inside Connect, helping make the summaries more relevant to their own learning experience. The new study materials are delivered through Learning Studio, a new personalized hub where students can access and revisit study materials without ever having to leave their course experience. These new capabilities build on McGraw Hill's growing portfolio of AI-powered learning tools, including AI Reader, which has been used by more than 3 million students since its launch in 2024. McGraw Hill is partnering with Breakout Learning to help instructors foster deeper learning and student participation by pairing their course content with interactive small-group discussions and solo oral assignments, with AI-enabled feedback to provide personalized insight into student comprehension and skill development at scale. Through Breakout Learning?s virtual platform, students engage in guided conversations that require them to apply course concepts in real time, helping build critical thinking, communication, collaboration and problem-solving skills. The platform?s AI-powered feedback capabilities help educators track participation and comprehension more efficiently while gaining deeper insight into student progress. Breakout Learning reports that 90% of students using its modules complete their assigned reading before the session, ensuring that they are better prepared to engage with the material in the classroom. As AI use expands across higher education, these new capabilities support instructors' increased emphasis on authentic assessment, providing opportunities for students to demonstrate what they know and how they apply knowledge through real-time assessments that increase engagement and drive learning outcomes. (C) S&P Capital IQ - 2026

Is ChatGPT dulling your brain? New studies raise alarming questions. Psychologists say generative tools can weaken attention and problem-solving. Key takeaways. * Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, studied how students worked before ChatGPT and their performance afterward. * They found that AI lets students speed up homework in the moment but weakens long-term understanding. * Still, students can use AI productively as a tutor while maintaining their critical thinking skills, according to a July study from Middlebury College. Scientists are finding that passive reliance on chatbots can blunt critical thinking - unless you change how you use them. A research team at the University of California, Irvine partnered with McGraw Hill to mine 10 years of usage data from Aleks, the company's widely adopted adaptive math platform. They pulled millions of problem-solving sessions completed by students from fifth grade through college from 2015 to 2025, then treated the late-2022 launch of ChatGPT as a natural breakpoint in the dataset. The researchers studied how students worked in the pre-ChatGPT era and how their behavior and performance changed after it launched. To determine where AI was most likely to creep into students' work, the team divided Aleks math items into two categories: word problems that could be easily copied into a chatbot and more visual, interactive graphing tasks that were difficult to paste into a chatbot. The time students spent on word problems fell sharply after ChatGPT's release even as their correctness rate went up. The authors said this pattern indicated that some students were using AI to do their work. When students sat down for proctored exams without access to AI tools, they were 25% less likely to answer word problems correctly than comparable cohorts before ChatGPT's arrival. Performance on graphing problems held steady. Sina Rismanchian, the U.C. Irvine Ph.D. candidate who led the study, recently told The New York Times that AI allows students to offload the step-by-step thinking they need to solve math problems. AI enables them to speed up homework in the moment while weakening their understanding in the long-term. Other studies clarify the relationship between AI use and critical thinking. In a separate multi-institutional experiment cited by Rismanchian and his co-authors, researchers looked at how adults tackled logic and reasoning problems with and without AI help. As participants grew used to letting language models handle the heavy lifting and skipped the "productive struggle" of working through each step themselves, they became more likely to abandon challenging questions that were still within their ability to solve. This mirrors broader findings that overreliance on AI makes people more prone to give up instead of persisting. "Part of how AI is making us dumber" is "undercutting the development of learning how to think in younger people that now have an alternative," Dr. Adam Green, a cognitive neuroscientist at Georgetown University, told the Times. Green likens the brain's impulse to avoid effort to the body's drive to hang onto calories. "Whatever you could do that exerted the least calories but didn't kill you was the best thing to do evolutionarily," he told the outlet. Still, students can use AI productively while maintaining their critical thinking skills. A July study from Middlebury College examined the habits of more than 200 undergraduate students. It found that students who used AI like a tutor had higher test scores and higher-quality essays than students who used it to draft their entire essays. Sherin shibu - news reporter. Entrepreneur Staff