Access Timing as Scaffolding: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to GenAI in Education
In recent years, generative AI (GenAI) in educational settings has become ubiquitous in university students' daily lives, despite its potential to induce over-reliance, metacognitive disengagement, and diminished learning when used unrestrictedly. While most prior research has focused on how to pedagogically scaffold its usage, the question of when to allow off-the-shelf GenAI remains understudied and lacks pedagogically grounded empirical investigation. We treat access timing itself as a form of implicit scaffolding and operationalize it through a reinforcement learning (RL) agent that decides when students should access GenAI, with a reward function grounded in metacognitive theory, cog...
| Authors | Janne Rotter, Pau Benazet i Montobbio, Davinia Hernández-Leo |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 15 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 August 2026 |
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