Cognitive Offloading in the Age of Generative AI: What Does It Mean for Students With Learning Disabilities?

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has introduced new opportunities to support students with learning disabilities (SWLDs) in educational settings. While interest in AI integration in classrooms continues to grow among educators and researchers, concerns persist regarding the potential to bypass essential cognitive processes and undermine learning when students are overreliant on GenAI. This conceptual review examines these tensions through the lens of cognitive offloading, the delegation of cognitive tasks to external tools. It synthesizes research on the cognitive challenges experienced by SWLDs, the benefits of GenAI as a compensatory aid, the risks of excessive cognitive offloading, and the cognitive and motivational factors that shape students’ offloading decisions, culminating in an initial conceptual model. The review concludes with implications for future research and practice to support strategic cognitive offloading, highlighting the need to investigate how SWLDs make offloading decisions and how these decisions influence learning in GenAI-supported contexts.