AERC Hosts: Professor Jason Lodge "Entangled evidence: Distributed cognition and the crisis of assessment validity"

The current obsession with AI "detection" or "integration” often relies on a flawed, internalist model of learning; the idea that cognition is a solo performance occurring strictly inside a student's head. But as AI agents become agentic partners rather than just tools, we are facing a fundamental restructuring of the thinking infrastructure. This session explores the "performance paradox”, the phenomenon where AI boosts immediate task achievement while silently eroding durable, long-term learning. Drawing on recent work regarding distributed cognition, we’ll discuss why this creates a crisis of inference for traditional measurement. If intelligence is now entangled, our assessment frameworks need to move past measuring the "product" and start finding valid ways to map the cognitive agency that remains.