Generative AI in the Classroom: Can Students Remain Active Learners?

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has high potential to help address a diversity of educational challenges. In principle, GAI could facilitate the implementation of interactive and empowering pedagogical activities to complement the standard teaching strategies and favor students active engagement, understanding and control over their learning processes. These dimensions are indeed fundamental for a better learning experience and longer-lasting cognitive outcomes. However, several characteristics of the interactions with GAI such as continuous confidence in the generated answers, and the lack of pedagogical stance in their behavior may lead students to poor states of control over learning (e.g. over-reliance on pre-generated content, over-estimation of one's own knowledge, loss of curious and critical-thinking sense, etc). The fine line between the two settings seems to lie in how this technology is used to carry out the pedagogical activities (e.g. types of interactions allowed, level of controllability by students, level of involvement of educators, etc) as well as to what extent students have the relevant skills (cognitive, metacognitive and GAI literacy) that allow them to correctly evaluate, analyze and interpret the system behaviors. In this context, this article proposes to identify some of the opportunities and challenges that could arise wrt students control over their learning when using GAI during formal pedagogical activities. In a second step, we also discuss the types of trainings that could be relevant to offer students in order to provide them with the appropriate set of skills that can help them use GAI in informed ways, when pursuing a given learning goal.