Didactics before tools: Redesigning teaching and assessment in the age of generative AI

Vollständiger Abstract

Worum geht es in dieser Arbeit?

Research and policy have become good at naming the cognitive risks that generative AI (GenAI) poses to learning. Namely, detrimental cognitive offloading, metacognitive laziness, and the illusion of competence. What this literature does much less well is tell teachers what to do with that knowledge in their everyday practice. This article argues that alongside AI literacy, regulation and safeguards protecting educational stakeholders, one of the central challenges facing education in the age of GenAI is related to didactic design. When a finished text or answer no longer reveals what a student has understood, struggled with, revised, verified or learned, teaching and assessment have to be redesigned so that the process of thinking is made visible and necessary again. We argue that this redesign should be approached through the classic didactic questions: why, what, how, when and for whom. We connect these questions with Question Zero (Q0), an approach to responsible technology adoption, through the dimensions of why, who, what, how and where. Both didactic and Q0 perspectives and underlying questions move the starting point from the technology to educational purpose, stakeholders and the conditions under which the use of selected technology is well-designed and justified. We argue that current AI strategies, guidelines and institutional frameworks in education leave a conspicuous gap precisely here. We translate these didactic and Q0 perspective questions into a concrete, phased design for teaching and assessment, whose guiding principle is not to forbid cognitive offloading but to regulate it didactically. We also argue that making the learning process visible is not in itself a neutral act, and that its design must attend to who carries its costs. This challenge recurs across education systems globally and cannot be solved by top-down regulation alone. Instead, translating high-profile principles of ethical AI in education into pedagogically sound use of GenAI requires the contextual and professional judgement of educators.