Agency in AI collaboration must be sustained throughout a task, not just established at the start.

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.

Co-authored by Ava Gilmartin, Paul Surlis, and Michael Hogan.

A university student opens ChatGPT minutes after receiving a creative problem-solving task. Within seconds, the AI generates several polished solutions. The student selects one, makes a few small changes, and submits the final response. Although the work appears sophisticated, something vital has been lost: the student’s independent idea generation. The AI completes much of the cognitive work before the learning process has even begun. While generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has enormous potential to support learning, this scenario highlights an important challenge facing higher education. The question is no longer whether students should use AI, but rather how AI can support learning without replacing human reasoning.

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. Rather than treating AI as an answer generator, the researchers investigated whether requiring students to contribute their own ideas throughout the collaboration produced better educational outcomes. Their findings suggest that AI enhances learning only when instructional design keeps students cognitively engaged at every stage of the problem-solving process.

The subtle nature of pedagogical design

Guo et al.'s study is particularly valuable because it does not simply compare AI........

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