AI in Higher Education: Students and AI Project

Results

Here is where you will find our latest outputs, publications, events, findings, and general developments. We will continue to update this page as we progress through the project. 

We have completed 19 focus groups with 79 students at our 4 Australian Universities. We’ve transcribed and conducted initial analyses on these.

We are also analysing survey responses from > 8000 students.

Publications

  • Henderson, M., Bearman, M., Chung, J., Fawns, T., Buckingham Shum, S., Matthews, K. E., & de Mello Heredia, J. (2025). Comparing Generative AI and teacher feedback: student perceptions of usefulness and trustworthiness. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2025.2502582.

    This paper reports on a comparison of survey data on student views on AI-generated feedback vs teacher feedback.

Student Survey

The survey developed to collect student data in 2024 is offered here under creative commons:

Chung, J., Henderson, M., Pepperell, N., Slade, C., Liang, Y. (2024). Student perspectives on AI in Higher Education: Student Survey. Student Perspectives on AI in Higher Education Project. https://doi.org/10.26180/27915930

Summaries

2-pager: HEDx Survey Highlights – Feedback – Handout
(April 2025)

Highlights from the survey relating to student use of GenAI for feedback, created in preparation for our panel at the HEDx Future Solutions Conference, April 2025.

2-pager: HEDx Survey Highlights – usage – Handout
(October 2024)

Highlights from the survey, created by UQ design team in preparation for our panel at the HEDx Future Solutions Conference, October 2024.

1-pager: Guidance for Academics: How students talk about GenAI
(August 2024)
Guidance for students and academics created by UQ students Alessandra Tran and Claudia Indraputri, supported by Kelly and Christine, who analysed our UQ-specific student focus group data.

Media

Students & AI: Five assumptions (Future Campus)

This series draws on emerging results from the project to question flawed assumptions about students and AI, offering a more nuanced look at issues of cheating, integrity, and learning . 

Talks

The following talks feature or make mention of our project and insights that are emerging from it.

Events

The following events are a chance to hear directly from the project team.  

Upcoming:

2025 HEDx Future Solutions Conference, Wednesday November 5, University of Queensland

Past:

Title: Riding the tiger of AI feedback: an AIinHE project update reporting on 7,000 students comparing teacher and AI feedback

2025 HEDx Future Solutions Conference, Wednesday April 2, State Library of Victoria

This presentation reported on insights from the survey about student use, motivations and trust of GenAI feedback.

Speakers: Margaret Bearman, Michael Henderson. 

Title: How do students view, use, and expect AI to shape their tertiary education?

2024 HEDx Future Solutions Conference, Thursday October 31, University of Queensland

There have been a lot of speculation, assumptions and claims being made about how students are using generative AI. To empirically investigate student use and beliefs of generative AI, we conducted 20 focus groups with 79 students from four Australian universities. The findings demonstrated the nuanced, varied and sophisticated ways that students are using to think about what it means to be a student in the age of GenAI. We then created a comprehensive survey to capture large scale data (~4000 students) specific to the Australian higher education context. In this presentation, we will report preliminary findings from both the focus groups and survey, and briefly illustrate the use of AI to analyse this data. This will be followed by a panel discussion to elaborate on the implications for policy and practice.

Speakers: Margaret Bearman, Simon Buckingham Shum, Michael Henderson. 

Facilitated by Kelly Matthews and Tim Fawns