It’s a pressing question that Trudy Purcell, Head of House and Commerce teacher at Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, has been grappling with since artificial intelligence entered schools and altered the face of teaching and learning as we knew it.
Purcell has a keen interest in working out how schools can combat the ‘fluency illusion’ AI can create for students, as well as how cognitive offloading can be avoided, and says it’s all about integrating the technology in careful and deliberate ways in the classroom.
On Thursday the educator is thrilled to be sharing her knowledge and insights with delegates at the Artificial Intelligence in Education Conference 2026 taking place in Geelong.
Held in various locations across the country, this year’s Victorian event will feature expert presentations, engaging panel discussions, and offer up a host of practical case studies from schools to show how educators are harnessing AI to create smarter classrooms, personalised learning, ultimately preparing students who are ready for the future.
EducationHQ is a media partner of the event and will be there on the ground to cover all the highlights as they unfold.
We spoke to Purcell* about her call for a shift in focus when it comes to assessment, and how she’s using AI in her own classroom to actually enhance learning and not as a tool for students to avoid engaging in any cognitive heavy lifting.
SD: Hi Trudy. Your presentation ‘Preparing Students for a World Where Knowledge Is No Longer Scarce’ is set for this Thursday, where does your interest in AI and education stem from?
TP: I’m an economics teacher by trade, so I spend a lot of time in the classroom speaking to students about the future of work and labour economics as part of a broader commerce interest.
I’ve also got a huge personal interest in AI. I’m a fairly curious individual. I like to play with AI and see how I can apply it in both my personal and professional life. I think the opportunity to fuse the two together was really obvious to me because my role primarily is to prepare students for the world – [beyond] my school and the nice, neat little ecosystem here, [because] the reality is one day they will enter the real world.
I just got really curious about how that’s going to change, as it always has, but I feel like the speed and the rate at which that change is coming with AI is pretty unprecedented. So, I started to look at it from more of an economics perspective as far as, well, what are the skills that will be valued by employers in the future and how will that shift?
And then that got me thinking about how I could retrospectively apply that within my teaching practice: how can we update assessments or teaching and learning strategies so that we’re preparing students for what’s to come?
We’ve seen a huge amount of concern coming from educational neuroscientists, teachers and policymakers around the potential for students to simply offload the learning process to AI, leaving them without critical foundational knowledge and skills. Is this a worry you share?
A hundred percent. Going back to why am I so passionate about championing AI in education, it’s about making sure that the engagement and the integration is meaningful.
I feel like at the moment, there’s not a lot of guardrails on how students engage with AI – if we’re being really specific, say a student jumps onto Claude or to ChatGPT and chucks something in and reads it, and job done. They’ve got this illusion that they understand it, this idea that, ‘oh, I get it’. It’s a fluency illusion where they read it and they think that means that’s learning. And if we go back to the science of learning, it’s not [the case].
So the outsourcing of the cognitive side of things, that’s a huge concern for our industry and one of the fundamental aspects of my talk. I’ve got some practical strategies that I want to speak to, as informed by some research, to unpack how we actually allow students to use AI to support their learning, but still make them go through the critical thinking process – because if they don’t do that, then what?
Trudy Purcell's presentation at the AI in Education Conference in Geelong will tackle the thorny issue of student assessment in the AI age.
Can you tell us more about how you see AI reshaping what counts as evidence of learning.
…as a teacher, obviously you’ve got your formative [take] on things, but we’ve always been really focused on the summative output. Generally speaking, a student would submit a piece of work and that is what is assessed – that’s the evidence of learning.
Whereas I think in an AI world, we’re going to have to throw some doubt onto what extent that output is genuinely the students’, versus did they outsource AI, and at what point did AI author the work, and at what point did AI critically evaluate it?
Part of trying to change the evidence base is to allow the engagement with AI to be part of the assessment process. If nothing else, [we should] look for opportunities to make that aspect of it transparent.
There’s a few AI products that are coming out now where you can access a student’s transcript, you can actually see the questions that were asked and how they went about engaging AI in their process, and you can see the thinking more clearly.
One of my practical strategies I’ll speak to is this idea of assessing thinking and not just the product because, as educators, we can’t solely rely on the product being the output of the student alone – we have to assume now that AI has been used and it’s our role to get in there and figure out to what extent AI informed the process, and guide students with that, and make sure they’ve got those skills so they can critically engage with AI so they are still learning.
It’s not about catching them out. It’s not a punitive or a deficit-based approach. It’s about embracing what we’ve got, moving forward, understanding that now is our time to switch assessment from (looking at) purely output to (integrating more focus on the) process.
So what does this look like in your Year 10 commerce class, for example?
At the Year 10 level, we can tweak and change assessment to integrate, for example, getting students to submit their transcript as part of their assessment or giving us consent to see their transcript so that we can actually have checkpoints along the process and go, ‘Cool, we’re at this point. How did you get there? How did you come up with this idea? What questions or how have you meaningfully engaged with AI? Let’s have a look at it’.
And just trying to push them more towards using the AI as a means of critiquing their work as opposed to using the AI to create the work. There’s early beginnings of that in my Year 10 commerce subjects.
Do you feel that the way you’re using AI at the moment in the classroom is actually enhancing the students’ learning or is it being used just for the sake of it, so to speak?
I genuinely do think it’s enhancing it. I’m consistently role modelling the use of AI chatbots in my classroom. I’ll often have them projected in the room – we might be exploring something, and I’ll have a specific chatbot that’s been created with all the syllabus and resources sitting behind it.
It’s very specific and tailored towards the subject. Take Unit 3-4 Accounting as an example, I’ll say, ‘let’s not just ask AI the question, let’s actually try and evaluate what we know’. So we put our prior knowledge in first, and then we tweak and change it, and I might go through that process with the students and prompt them to help me to develop the prompt.
It’s been really cool, actually. My gauge on it is that it’s enhanced learning, because now I’ve got students who are using that chatbot … and when I peer over their shoulder, I’m having that (deeper) conversation with them. And [their] questions are allowing them to critically evaluate their prior knowledge, as opposed to using it to generate knowledge for the first time.
The other part of that is, in instances where maybe I’ve not engaged with AI, it’s still there anyway. We teach with laptops, and so the reality for me as an educator is when those students are on their laptops … they will have their various AIs open – they are using it. Unless there’s a directive to say, ‘don’t use AI’, which is not what we’ve received, I feel like a better way to approach the scenario is to guide them, and support them, and role model it, so that they can see how it can be used in a meaningful way.
Otherwise, I’m concerned they just go rogue, and then we have to wind it back.
For delegates attending your session, what is the key message or takeaway that you’d like them to take back to their schools?
“I want to be really deliberate in ensuring that everybody understands their role going forward. So the room will be full of educators, and every one of those educators will have an opportunity to influence the way in which their students engage with AI.
And if that way that they engage with AI is deliberate, it’s meaningful, it’s substantiated and it’s considered, we’re in a really good place in ensuring our students have the information, the knowledge, the skills to a) meaningfully integrate AI into what they do and b), safeguard their critical thinking skills or the development of.
I’m just super grateful to have this opportunity. I’m a teacher in a school. I have my classroom. I feel pretty small fry as far as the landscape (is concerned), so I feel really privileged to have a tap on the shoulder to come and share my thoughts and experiences. So thank you for giving me another opportunity to do so.
*The views expressed by the interviewee may not necessarily reflect those of her employer.
