Guide learners toward the Trust Phase while actively preventing a slide into Dependency¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

The article's closing insight states that education's goal "is not to resist AI, but to guide learners toward the Trust Phase while actively preventing a slide into Dependency." In the Trust phase AI functions as a cognitive scaffold for brainstorming, clarification, and exploratory reasoning while responsibility for evaluation and understanding remains with the learner. Success means enabling students to use AI to reach higher levels of abstraction, metacognition, and creativity without relinquishing foundational cognitive skills.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• AI integrated into learning workflows as an assistive rather than substitutive technology
• Learners actively decide when and how to use AI and assess its outputs

Constraints¶

• The article states that understanding how and when this balance is achieved remains an open and urgent question

Target Learners¶

• Students in AI-mediated learning environments

Target Learning Goals¶

• Metacognitive regulation of AI use
• Preserving judgment, synthesis, and epistemic ownership

Affordances¶

• Four Phases Student Perception Hi Vs Ai

Related Strategies¶

• Research directions: scaffold reasoning without displacing epistemic agency and rethink curricula to preserve core human capabilities

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Islem Rekik. (2026). Evidence of a Cognitive Shift in AI Education: How Students Are Rethinking Human Intelligence? Published as a conference paper at ICLR HCAIR Workshop 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16292