The Science and Art of Understanding: Preparing Students for a World of Intelligent Tools

We are entering a world where producing an answer may mean little without the ability to interrogate it. So what should happen in a student's brain before handing the work to a machine? This session explores the knowledge and cognitive experiences that make intelligent technology useful rather than merely convenient, and what students need to understand before they can responsibly delegate work. Starting with tools students already use every day, such as search engines, calculators, navigation, translation, and recommendation systems, the session builds toward the emerging capabilities of generative AI and intelligent agents. Rather than treating AI as the starting point for instructional decisions, you will consider how a clear understanding of learning should guide when, why, and how technology enters the process. You will leave with a new lens for designing learning grounded in knowledge, mental models, cognitive load, retrieval, reasoning, and transfer, and ideas for building the foundations students need to question, evaluate, and direct intelligent tools.