Developing learners’ metacognitive awareness of their cognitive needs

Develop methods or interventions that enable learners engaged in AI-assisted data literacy to recognize their own moment-specific cognitive needs, particularly distinguishing when they require receptive guidance versus deliberative, scaffolded reasoning, so they can better align their interaction with AI systems.

Background

Because cognitive demand can be opaque—especially for novices who may default to answer-seeking—users may not recognize when they would benefit from reflective, scaffolded processes instead of direct answers, risking cognitive passivity.

The proposed cognitive alignment framework highlights the user-side need for metacognitive capacity so that learners can self-assess and engage with AI in ways that promote learning rather than dependence.

References

While this paper aims to discuss the high-level notion for advancing AI-assisted literacy, we leave questions for the community to answer in the future research: (2) From the user side, how can learners develop the metacognitive awareness to recognize their own cognitive needs?

— Disrupting Cognitive Passivity: Rethinking AI-Assisted Data Literacy through Cognitive Alignment  (2604.02783 - Ahn et al., 3 Apr 2026) in Section 1, Introduction