Designing an AI Facilitator to Support Collaborative Argumentation at Scale in Secondary Education Classrooms
Duration: January 2027 – December 2027
Education level: Upper secondary level
Topic: AI – Artificial Intelligence, Digital Tools
Keywords: AI Facilitator; Collaborative Argumentation; Secondary Education
Initial situation
Collaborative argumentation can deepen conceptual understanding and foster critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. Yet it remains difficult to implement effectively at classroom scale. Teachers must organise group work, monitor multiple discussions, ensure balanced participation, identify weak or unsupported arguments, and provide timely feedback. This project develops a voice-based AI facilitator that supports small-group argumentation while providing teachers with actionable real-time or post-hoc insights.
Objectives
The project has three objectives: (1) co-design and develop a teacher- and student-centred, voice-based AI facilitator for collaborative argumentation; (2) investigate appropriate facilitation strategies, including when and how the AI should intervene and how teachers can configure and oversee it; and (3) evaluate the system in authentic secondary-school classrooms, examining dialogue quality, group dynamics, and teacher and student perceptions.
Method
We follow a Design Science Research approach combining co-design, iterative prototyping, and mixed-method evaluation.
Planned translation
The project will deliver an open-source AI facilitator, a teacher implementation guide, and example classroom scripts. These outputs will support continued classroom use and adaptation by other schools and educational contexts.
The project aims to make collaborative argumentation easier to scale by supporting both student discussions and teacher orchestration.
