There are six approaches for utilizing AI in classrooms: AI-tutor, AI-coach, AI-mentor, AI-teammate, AI-simulator, and AI-student, each with distinct pedagogical benefits and risks.
There are six AI frameworks that can help students learn with AI and learn about AI as follows: AI-tutor, for increasing knowledge, AI-coach for increasing metacognition, AI-mentor to provide balanced, ongoing feedback, AI-teammate to increase collaborative intelligence, AI-simulator to help with practice, and AI-student to check for understanding.
These frameworks are based on the premise that not only are students responsible for their own work but they should actively oversee the AIs output, check with reliable sources, and complement any AI output with their unique perspectives and insights. The aim here is to encourage students to critically assess and interrogate AI outputs, rather than passively accept them. This approach helps to sharpen their skills while having the AI serve as a supportive tool for their work, not a replacement. Although the AI’s output might be deemed “good enough,” students should hold themselves to a higher standard, and be accountable for their AI use.
- AI as a mentor: AI has the potential to help students get frequent feedback as they work by providing immediate and adaptive reactions to their projects.
- Benefits: Frequent feedback improves learning outcomes, even if all advice is not taken.
- Risks: There is a risk of confabulation which is manageable as long as students are aware that they are in charge of their own work and that any feedback they receive should be rigorously checked in light of their own knowledge.
- AI as a tutor: Provides students with direct instruction and educational guidance
- Benefits: Personalized direct instruction is very effective. An AI tutor can push students to generate responses and think through problems, connect ideas, and offer feedback and practice.
- Risks: The concern with AI tutoring is the risk of confabulation – using a tool that can make up plausible-seeming incorrect answers is a critical flaw.
- AI as a coach: An AI coach can help and direct students to engage in a metacognitive process and help them articulate their thoughts about a past event or plan for the future by careful examination of the past and present. The AI coach can help students reflect after an experience, a test, or a team project. It can also help students plan before starting any team project.
- Benefits: The AI coach can help students reflect on a team experience or ask students to predict potential failures via mental time travel, simulating future states of failure and considering ways to route around those possible failures.
- Risks: Confabulation risks are not as severe in coaching, which are designed to stimulate student thinking. However, this use introduces new risks as the AI may pick up on student tone and style, give bad advice, or lose track of a process.
- AI as teammate: AI as a teammate has the potential to help teams increase their collaborative intelligence. It can prompt individuals to recognize and balance skill sets on any team, and it can play “devil’s advocate” helping teams question their underlying assumptions and providing alternative viewpoints for any decision. Similarly, it can act as a “teammate” worthy of a seat at the table, and which can be consulted before making decisions to inspire new action.
- Benefits: AI as a teammate can help teams increase synergy by focusing on each team member’s strengths and skills and it can help teams plan how they’ll work together on their project. Teams can also use the AI as Devil’s Advocate by sharing a major decision with the AI and then work with the AI to come up with alternative viewpoints or potential drawbacks..
- Risks: The AI can confabulate or make up facts that may lead teams to the wrong decision, it can give teams advice that isn’t specific or contextualized, students who begin to think of the AI as a teammate may not challenge its opinions or advice and may be tempted to let the AI take the lead, even when it’s less than helpful.
- AI as student: For students with knowledge of a topic, the AI can be useful as a way to check their understanding and fluency about that topic by teaching the AI about the topic and evaluating its output and explaining what the AI got right and wrong or what it may have missed.
- Benefits: Students can assess the AIs examples and explanations, identify gaps or inconsistencies in how the AI adapts theories to new scenarios, and then explain those issues to the AI. The student’s assessment of the AI’s output and their suggestions for improvement of that output is a learning opportunity.
- Risks: AI may not recognize or understand the examples the students want, or argue with students about their critique. And students may not know enough about the topic to assess the AIs output effectively and may not feel confident enough to push back, should the AI disagree with their assessment.
- AI as a simulator: AI can help students practice hard-to-practice skills in new situations. One way to challenge students to think in new ways is to prompt the AI to build a role playing scenario, focusing on a specific concept or series of concepts, pushing students to problem solve and make a consequential decision and giving students feedback about their performance.
- Benefits: AI can take on the role of scenario creator, setting up a story for students and helping them make a decision and work through problems.
- Risks: The AI can hallucinate and make up facts about any concept. It may not have enough information about the specific concept or series of concepts and it doesn’t know the students’ learning level (it has no sense of where the students are).
These frameworks can serves as guidelines for implementing AI in the classroom and help assess the value of their contribution to student learning by considering their benefits and risks.