A New Challenge for Higher Education: Maintaining Human Agency in AI-Assisted Learning

A recent study highlights an important challenge facing higher education: how to support learning without replacing human reasoning. The increasing use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in educational settings has led to a new question: whether AI can enhance learning without diminishing students’ intellectual independence.

Guo et al.’s (2025) study, Student–AI Creative Problem-Solving: The Role of Human Agency, addresses this challenge by examining how the integration of human ideas can affect the sustained creativity of student-AI collaboration. The researchers investigated whether requiring students to contribute their own ideas throughout the collaboration produced better educational outcomes.

The study involved two quantitative experiments involving 346 university students, who completed the same creative task under different AI collaboration conditions. In the first experiment, one group generated their own ideas before consulting ChatGPT (pre-SHT), while another group consulted AI first and then added their own ideas afterwards (post-SHT). A control group relied on AI throughout the task without any instruction to engage in independent thinking (without-SHT). The results showed that students who generated their own ideas before using AI reported greater initiative, stronger ownership of their work, and invested more mental effort than those who immediately turned to AI.

However, this advantage gradually disappeared as students continued collaborating with AI. By the third prompt, many participants had begun following the AI’s suggestions instead of directing the collaboration themselves. This finding is particularly interesting, as simply delaying AI use encouraged independent thinking initially, but it was insufficient to sustain human agency throughout the task.

Recognising this limitation, Guo et al. redesigned the collaboration in a second experiment. Instead of asking participants to think independently only at the beginning, they introduced a deep idea integration (DII) condition, which required students to integrate their own ideas into every interaction with ChatGPT. The results showed that students maintained higher levels of perceived agency throughout the task, produced prompts that remained cognitively sophisticated across all stages of the collaboration, and generated final solutions that were significantly more novel and useful.

The study’s findings have significant implications for education. They highlight the importance of understanding what is meant by human agency in AI-supported learning. Agency refers to students’ ability to intentionally direct their own learning by contributing to and maintaining ownership over the problem-solving process. The study’s results suggest that AI supports learning most effectively when educational design requires students to remain active contributors rather than passive recipients throughout the learning process.

Guo et al.’s study also highlights the need for educators to develop assessment and teaching strategies that reward the learning process as much as the final product. Encouraging students to critically question and build upon AI-generated suggestions will help ensure that AI can strengthen, rather than diminish, the intellectual skills and the human agency of students.

The study’s findings are in line with broader educational theories that position agency as central to effective learning. They reinforce the idea that AI can act as a powerful learning partner when students use it to refine and expand their own ideas rather than outsource the learning process.

In conclusion, Guo et al.’s study highlights the importance of maintaining human agency in AI-assisted learning. By understanding what is meant by human agency and designing educational interactions that preserve students’ intellectual independence, educators can ensure that AI supports learning without replacing human reasoning.

Key Takeaways:

• A study finds human agency fades fast, unless renewed at every GenAI prompt.
• Students who thought first before using AI still drifted toward following AI by the third prompt.
• Requiring an original idea at every prompt kept students directing the AI, not the other way around.