La Trobe University researchers explain how schools can use GenAI to support learning without replacing student thinking.
Everywhere Dr Alexia Maddox turned, teachers were asking the same question.
Rather than debating whether artificial intelligence belonged in classrooms, they wanted to know: How do we use it well?
It was the question Dr Maddox, Senior Lecturer in Pedagogy and Education Futures at La Trobe University, and her colleagues Professor Miriam Tanti and Dr Emma Phillips – herself a former teacher – heard repeatedly from teachers, principals and school leaders grappling with the rapid arrival of generative AI.
“Teachers were crying out for support,” Maddox tells EduChoice.
On one side sat the fear that students were outsourcing their thinking to chatbots. On the other was the promise that AI would transform teaching and reduce workload. Between the two, she says, was a glaring gap.
“We had the fear and the promise, but we had nothing in between.”
Dr Maddox, Prof Tanti and Dr Phillips set out to produce something teachers needed immediately: a practical guide grounded in the science of learning, filled with classroom examples, and designed to answer the question educators had been asking all along.
The result is The Science of Learning and Generative AI: A Practical Guide for Secondary Teachers—a free, living resource that doesn’t tell teachers whether to embrace or avoid AI. Instead, it asks a more important question: How can AI support learning without doing the thinking for students?
The hidden risk: ‘Cognitive offload’
Cognitive offload. It’s not a phrase most teachers use in everyday conversation, but Dr Maddox believes it captures one of the biggest risks facing education in the age of AI.
“People often say AI is making us dumber,” she says. “What they’re really talking about is going to these tools for a quick answer instead of engaging deeply with the idea.”
In other words, the danger isn’t necessarily that students are using AI. It’s that they’re allowing AI to do the intellectual work that leads to genuine understanding.
“We’re all under the pump,” Dr Maddox says. “It’s easy to think, ‘Here’s something that looks like the answer,’ plug it in and move on.”
The problem, she explains, is that while AI can produce polished, convincing responses in seconds, learning doesn’t happen simply because information has been presented.
“We retain nothing of that process. We can’t retrieve it later because we haven’t done the work that actually builds understanding.”
That distinction underpins the entire guide. Drawing on decades of science of learning research, it argues that effective classroom use of AI should reduce unnecessary cognitive load—not remove the productive struggle that helps students build knowledge and strengthen memory over time.
Rather than offering abstract theory, the guide walks teachers through realistic classroom scenarios across subjects including Science, English, History and Health and Physical Education. Each vignette demonstrates how carefully designed prompts, retrieval practice and teacher questioning can turn AI into a thinking partner rather than an answer machine.
Importantly, Dr Maddox stresses that the publication isn’t intended to be the final word on AI in education.
“This is a living resource,” she says. “The technology is evolving so quickly that our understanding and our guidance need to evolve with it.”
What won’t change, however, is the role of the teacher.
“The student is the centre. The teacher-student relationship is the centre,” Dr Maddox says. “These tools should deepen learning—not replace the thinking that learning requires.”
Those ideas—and the practical strategies behind them—are explored in much greater depth in EduChoice‘s full interview with Dr Alexia Maddox. She discusses how the guide’s classroom examples were created, why memory and retrieval practice remain central in an AI world, and what every school leader should understand before introducing generative AI into teaching and learning.
Read the full interview in the inaugural edition of EduChoice magazine. Subscribe to the EduChoice e-newsletter to be notified when the feature is published and receive the latest news, insights and thought leadership shaping Australian education.