From Assistance to Dependence: The Influence of AI-Generated Reading Texts on Critical Thinking Development among CPGE and EMSI Students in Morocco

His study examines whether AI-generated reading texts can scaffold critical-thinking development in two academically demanding EFL contexts in Tangier, Morocco: the Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Écoles (CPGE) and the École Marocaine des Sciences d’Ingénieurs (EMSI). Across an eight-week comparative sequence, performance under AI-generated and traditional authentic-text conditions was tracked at Weeks 1, 4, and 8. Scores rose from 54 to 82 in the AI-text condition and from 55 to 69 in the traditional-text condition. The AI condition therefore showed a 28-point gain, compared with a 14-point gain in the traditional condition; the descriptive difference-in-differences was 14 points. The same direction of difference appeared in both CPGE and EMSI. The findings suggest that AI-generated texts can function as useful cognitive scaffolds when paired with teacher mediation, higher-order reading tasks, and continued exposure to authentic complexity.

AI-generated texts; critical thinking; EFL reading; cognitive load; scaffolding

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