Pre-Service Teachers' Agency During Their Interactions with Generative AI While Designing for Learning

Synthesis: Krushinskaia, Elen, and Raes (2026) use process-level indicators of Agency to examine 78 pre-service teachers randomly assigned to design learning materials with either a custom expert GenAI bot scaffolded on an instructional-design model or basic ChatGPT. Two of three agency indicators (length of interaction and self-generated prompts/ownership) suggested higher agency in the expert-bot condition, but a third indicator — collaborative Problem Solving — revealed reduced agency in both conditions, as participants often simply agreed with the bot's suggestions rather than meaningfully critiquing them.

Key Findings

• Using process-level indicators, pre-service teachers in the expert-bot condition interacted longer and generated more self-generated prompts, suggesting greater agentic engagement on those dimensions.
• A third agency indicator, collaborative problem-solving, revealed reduced agency in both conditions: participants frequently agreed with AI output instead of providing meaningful Feedback.
• Both the material constraints of the expert bot and the open-ended structure of ChatGPT impose distinct constraints on teacher agency.
• Prior knowledge about GenAI or instructional design moderates how much agency a teacher can exercise in either context.

Implications for AI in Education

The study is among the first to examine teacher agency during GenAI interactions at the process level rather than through self-report, and it complicates the assumption that more Scaffolding necessarily preserves or enhances agency. It connects teacher agency to Intelligent-TPACK and design for learning, and shows that the material design of AI tools shapes how much genuine ownership and critical engagement teachers can exercise. For Teacher Education, it implies professional development should attend to the design affordances and constraints of AI tools and cultivate teachers' critical evaluation of AI output, not just their tool use.

Connected Concepts

• Agency
• Teacher Education
• TPACK
• Learning Design
• Scaffolding
• Teacher AI Competency
• Generative AI

Connected Articles

• [intelligent-tpack-ethics-teachers-trust-distrust-2026] — ethical and trust dimensions of Intelligent-TPACK
• [reclaiming-epistemic-agency-co-agency-2026] — epistemic agency and human–AI co-agency
• [teacher-student-agency-orchestration] — orchestration of agency between teachers and students

Citation

Krushinskaia, K., Elen, J., & Raes, A. (2026). Pre-service teachers' agency during their interactions with generative AI while designing for learning – a process view on Intelligent-TPACK. Computers and Education Open, 10, 100325.