There is no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) is shaping our interactions with the world and with each other. The topic dominates conversations across personal and professional circles. In educational settings, the push to integrate AI into preschool through graduate school instruction intensifies at an increasingly rapid rate. Undoubtedly, AI offers numerous benefits: You can read below to learn about a unique interdisciplinary project to support mental-health clinicians as well as an entrepreneurial venture using AI to find a healthcare plan. Each celebrated use of AI generates questions about how to thoughtfully and ethically use AI to support, not replace, learning. A tension exists between ensuring our students are gaining the skills needed to be competitive in the workplace and verifying that we are not handing over too much learning to technology, shifting from what has traditionally been learning through human interaction to learning through digital interactions. 

As a school psychologist by training, I tend to view technological advances in education from social and cognitive perspectives and with a lens deeply influenced by developmental theory and research on learning. This lens underscores the importance of the “human in the loop” and forces us to think deeply about how human skills, talents, qualities and dispositions enrich the learning process in ways that technology cannot. When we fully embrace what we have to offer in support of learning, we can focus on how best to leverage technology to enhance and complement our human efforts. We can actively shape the use of AI to ensure students fully understand what AI is and how it is best used. With our guidance, they can differentiate between when AI helps learning and when AI interferes with or replaces the critical cognitive processes that characterize deep and active learning. Centering the human in our interactions with AI promotes agency that is central to healthy development, self-regulated learning, a sense of accomplishment or mastery, and purpose. 

As the dean of the College of Education, I am proud of the ways we are approaching the integration of AI into instruction and learning, our classrooms, our research, and our real-world applications. The stories below illustrate how College of Education students, faculty and alumni are exploring the best ways to use AI to advance learning with careful attention to issues of responsible use, ethics, and the continued importance of human interaction. I hope you’ll take some time to read the expanded versions and, perhaps, join our monthly AI webinar starting Tuesday, September 8 .

Robin Hojnoski

Dean, College of Education

Professor, School Psychology 

IN THIS ISSUE:

Prioritizing Human Intelligence│Improving Mental Health Training Tools│Using AI in STEM
Becoming Strategic AI Users│Supporting Student Thinking

Using AI to Aid in Healthcare Choices

AI in Education Webinar Series │ Alumni Connections │ More News and Events

“Mental health access does not begin when a patient gets an appointment. It begins when that patient can explain pain, fear, trauma or family pressure in the language they prefer and know the person on the other side will understand more than just the words.”

-Vanesa Mora Ringle

AI Training Tool Addresses Mental Healthcare Language Gap

At a time when many people seeking mental healthcare still struggle to find a clinician who understands their language and culture, two Lehigh University researchers, along with a third from George Mason University, have received grant support from Lehigh University for a project aimed at helping to train providers and close that gap. 

Vanesa Mora Ringle, assistant professor in the COE's Counseling Psychology program, along with co-principal investigators Mooi Choo Chuah, professor in Lehigh's P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science and Amanda Sanchez, assistant professor in George Mason University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, is leading the CALLM-Care project, short for Culturally Adaptive Large Language Model (LLM)-Guided Care.

CALLM-Care is being developed as a training tool for mental health therapists. Using artificial intelligence, the platform will simulate patients from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, allowing trainees and practitioners to practice counseling interactions and receive feedback on their cultural and linguistic responsiveness.

• Read more on the COE News Site.

“Students are going to use AI. Education has to move beyond asking whether they should use it and begin thinking carefully about how we design AI experiences that help students learn.”

-Zilong Pan

Guided AI Support for STEM Learning

Zilong Pan, assistant professor in the COE's TLT program, is developing an AI-powered suite to help students work through STEM problems while keeping teachers in the learning loop.

When a student gets stuck on a math problem, computer program, or statistical analysis, generative AI can produce an answer almost instantly. Pan is interested in a different question: What if AI helped students figure out the answer themselves.

Pan is developing StemPal, a suite of educational Chrome extensions that provide students with guided hints and instruction and give teachers data and analytical tools to better understand student progress and engagement.

Rather than serving as a shortcut around learning, StemPal is designed to make AI an integral part of the learning process.

• Read the full story on the COE News Site.
• Read Pan's op-ed on PennLive titled The question is no longer whether students will use AI. 

“We as learners, as users, have to make ourselves ready for AI. Even with technology, you need self-regulated learning to be successful in all subjects. It is another soft skill that will help you succeed in the long term, and it will have a very long-term influence on your life as well.”

-Juan Zheng

Hybrid Intelligence System Helps Students Become Strategic AI Users

Juan Zheng, assistant professor in the COE's TLT program, has received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support her project titled, "Meta-Partner: Hybrid Intelligence for Self-Regulated Learning," which aims to address these questions and help students become strategic AI users.

Zheng is collaborating with other Lehigh professors and students to develop Meta-Partner, a hybrid intelligence system that helps students grow their AI literacy and self-regulation skills across all subjects through goal setting, strategy and progress monitoring, and self-reflection.

Through the platform, students address a real-world problem related to AI using both their AI and subject knowledge. For example, a high school student may be asked to use machine learning to sort a list of endangered species. To solve the problem, the student receives suggestions for learning goals through Meta-Partner that they can revise based on their knowledge of the subject by conversing with the AI agent.

• Read the full story in the Lehigh Alumni Bulletin.
• Check out Zheng's op-ed titled, Future belongs to strategic AI users: Here’s how we prepare them in the Morning Call.

“My graduate experiences have helped me grow not only as an emerging researcher, but also as a future educator who hopes to use technology thoughtfully to create more meaningful and supportive learning opportunities."

-Jiayan Zhu

Supporting Student Thinking

This summer, TLT doctoral student Jiayan Zhu helped develop and lead the “AI for Kids” project through Growth Mindset Education, LLC. The project-based program was designed to help young learners understand not only how to use AI, but also how to think critically and work effectively with it.

Students enrolled in the summer program were first introduced to key concepts of agentic AI and then put those ideas into practice by collaborating with AI to build their own projects. The curriculum also incorporated metacognitive scaffolding to encourage students to think more deliberately about how they were working with AI. As they developed their projects, students learned to guide their interactions with AI and refine their own ideas rather than simply accepting what AI generated, with parental support available throughout the learning process.

• Read the full story

Simplifying Healthcare Plan Selection With AI

Anyone who has tried to navigate the selection of a healthcare plan through Medicare, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or an Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement (ICHRA) knows the process can be complex.

The number of plan options can be overwhelming and pose a plethora of questions. Which plan will cover an individual’s prescriptions or preferred doctors? What’s the price tag for an upcoming doctor’s appointment? What would the out-of-pocket expense be to have a baby?

WiseCare AI, the brainchild of husband-and-wife team Gokhan Metan M’06 Ph.D.’08 and COE alumna Demet Metan MS’09 (Instructional Technology), is designed to answer those questions and more using an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that provides a simple-to-use, conversational format.

The platform, which can operate in any language, goes far beyond the standard of a basic search-and-sort function currently used on most insurance websites, offering plan recommendations personalized to an individual’s needs, according to the Metans.

• Read the full story in the Lehigh Alumni Bulletin.

Connect with Us!

Preparing today’s educators to develop and apply solutions to real world challenges is crucial to transforming learning experiences locally and globally. Please consider making a gift to the College of Education to ensure we can continue to drive positive changes in our schools and communities.