Challenging Mindsets Around Artificial Intelligence in Education - Locus of Control with Dr Jodie Torrington

Is AI something that controls us, or is it a tool we can learn to control? In this episode, Dr Jodie Torrington explores one of the most important yet overlooked questions in AI education: locus of control. Drawing on her research in self-regulated learning, AI literacy and educational psychology, Jodie challenges fear-based narratives and explains how educators can develop the knowledge, confidence and agency to work with AI rather than be led by it. Discover practical strategies for fostering critical thinking, metacognition and ethical AI use, while empowering students and teachers to retain human agency in an AI-enhanced world. 

Support readings:

Generative AI for Educators Coursera course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/mqfoa-generative-ai-literacy-and-prompting-skills-for-educators 

Torrington, J., Ballsun-Stanton, B., & Lai, J. W. (2025, February 21). Teaching Students How to Effectively Interact with LLMs at University: Insights on the Longitudinal Development of AI-Locus of Control. https://osf.io/preprints/edarxiv/6mke5_v3

Torrington, J., Bower, M. & Burns, E.C. What self-regulation strategies do elementary students utilize while learning online?. Educ Inf Technol 28, 1735–1762 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11244-9

Transcript

Ellie Meissner: Today I'm joined by Doctor Jodie Torrington, a researcher and educator from the School of Education at Macquarie University and who sits at the intersection of technology, learning and teacher education. Her research focuses on self-regulated learning in the digital environment, technology enhanced learning, and the evolving role of AI in education. More than 25 years of experience as a primary, educator, she brings both classroom insights and research expertise to questions about how learners develop digital capability and how educators can support meaningful engagement with technology. She has published widely on the topics, and I'm very happy to have Jodie here today with me, to speak to me about her research and passion that she has for all of these topics. Welcome.

Jodie Torrington: Hi, Ellie. Thanks for having me.

Ellie Meissner: So, Jodie, tell me about your work and what has first drawn to the intersection of technology and how students actually learn.

Jodie Torrington: My work is all about, how technology can support, teaching and learning and it's that intersection between educational psychology of learning and how learning happens most effectively with educational technology and bringing those two areas together.

So, I have done work on teacher created video instruction. My master's of research was all about that based on my own, classroom experience. I'll get to that in a minute. But, then going into looking at supporting self-regulated learning in digital contexts. So that was my PhD research. And now I've kind of morphed and applied that into effectively integrating AI into classrooms. So, AI literacy work. And now, we're currently in the middle of, developing an AI locus of control framework and continuum. So your control beliefs around AI. 

Ellie Meissner: It really has evolved for you hasn't it. So from your initial interest and then looking at it in a deeper level, and, so for you what what does it look like. Self-regulated learning then students working with technology

Jodie Torrington: This work was my PhD research and that was looking at what self-regulated learning means. How students, how they manage, how they monitor, how they check and evaluate the strategies and effectiveness of those strategies while they're learning. And so I was looking in a digital context, and we know that self-regulated learners, there's a variety of different theoretical frameworks you can use. But they agree on these, two aspects. So to be self-regulated learner, you are a learner that monitors the strategies you use, and you respond to either your own feedback or someone's feedback, and you're able to adapt and change to a more kind of effective strategy for your learning. And the other important point is that you can verbalise a justification of the strategies you're using. So you can tell someone what strategies you've chosen to do, to help your learning and why they're effective. And so when we take this into, a digital context, we're looking at, how students plan, how they monitor their learning as they're working on websites or apps or whatever they're doing in that digital world, and whether they can, monitor, modify and adapt their processes.

My PhD specifically looked at stage three children, so years five and six in a primary school.
We looked at how they manage themselves really, when they were doing a research task online. And, basically we were looking at, these five main areas. We used Roger Azevedo, who's a very big Ed Psych, Ed Tech, Professor in the US. His framework. So we were looking at, like, planning strategies that students we were using and monitoring strategies that they were using, the actual cognitive strategies that they were using when they were doing the work online, how they handled task difficulties, like task management strategies and then also like that interest and engagement kind of aspect as well. 

Ellie Meissner: Yeah. 

Jodie Torrington: So we're looking at those areas and interestingly, my research found that, for that primary school aged students, they spend the majority of the time online doing the thing. They were great kids. 75% of the time they were just doing the thing. Not much time on actually monitoring their process of learning and the product of learning. So how they were going and the strategies, whether they were effective, they didn't really like stop and ask themselves or check or do any of those monitoring strategies to make sure they were on task or on track or even doing the task as required? It was just like, doing it. Very little, planning time too, like, thinking about what was my goal, you know, what do I need to achieve that goal? You know, have I have I achieved my goal, you know, all of those really important aspects of being self-regulated.

Ellie Meissner: Like your research obviously has evolved from, from that initial page PhD quite significantly. So what from that learning did you really take away and continue to explore. 

Jodie Torrington: Yeah I think all of that, the metacognitive monitoring. All that metacognitive side of things, really interests me. That thinking about your learning and the thinking about how effective you're being as a learner and, monitoring not only the product, which is kind of what we focus on as teachers, did you do the actual learning task. But that monitoring of the process of learning. And there's some simple strategies that, in my studies, the kids weren't doing, but also the teachers didn't really know. And these are like well researched and validated studies. But it's like getting them into that practice of everyday classroom. That's the challenge. But now applying that to the, very powerful world of A.I. And a couple of different projects I'm on. So I'm just looking at how teachers are using A.I. in their classrooms and their kind of pedagogical practices and patterns that we're seeing, just kind of reporting on that. Which is super interesting. And then there's this other big project with, yeah, the locus of control thinking, which is looking at people's mindsets towards AI and how they kind of conceptualise AI as a thing. Because that affects how then you introduce it to your students that effects how you talk about it, the language you use. And it comes back to like understanding what AI is and.

Ellie Meissner: And I know you're very passionate. And you give a lot of talks, and developed educational material around that as well. So I'm sure you're happy to talk about that. If anyone who listens in today is interested in that.

Jodie Torrington: Yeah. And we've produced a Coursera course, which is all about generative AI literacy and prompting skills, basically for educators. I mean, there's so much out there about 'What is A.I. literacy?''What do teachers need now?' 'How do we up-skill ourselves?' There's agreement that teachers need up-skilling in these three big areas, which is: A technical understanding of like getting your head around what is AI. What makes the tool work. And how does it work. And understanding large language models and just some of the terminology. For example, it's not a search engine, it's not Google. It works in a completely different way. And so to have, to think of it like a search engine is not right.

For a teacher, what does that mean for me? What can A.I. do for me? How can I use it to support myself in my practice, in my classroom? How can my students use it to enhance and support their learning? And then that practical understanding of the so what? And then embedded throughout all of that, is this ethical understanding. So it's getting ahead around ethical concerns and challenges, biases, misrepresentations, the way the training data or the sorts of training data, that was used to train the big models and then what that means for you as an educator to watch out for. Environmental concerns, copyright issues. Yeah. So those are three areas. So our course, unpacks that in great detail, and then goes into show you how to actually retain your internal locus of control. In other words, that you can actually guide and steer and manipulate A.I. output if you know how to do the input. 

Ellie Meissner:  And you do talk about agency in your research and in your seminars. right? Not being afraid of using A.I. almost as a partner in what you do. And you already said, a good question, what can I do for me? Right? Like, how can I utilise it? Yeah. 

Jodie Torrington: And that idea of retaining agency, I mean, everybody is talking about this human A.I. agency and interactions and, you know, all of the buzzwords almost now. But what does that actually mean when you're using an A.I. tool? How can you retain your agency? And we show you in quite a lot of depth how providing context and details and being quite long and specific with your prompting, those things actually do impact the output that you get from an A.I. system. And the way you can ask it to 'work with me', 'ask me questions'. All of those instructions in your prompting so that you are guiding the A.I. and its responses. You're not just having this external locus of control where you believe that A.I. is this thing, over here. And whatever it spits out, yeah, that's better than me. I'm going to take that.

Ellie Meissner: That's where a lot of the fear comes from as well, right? That in our educational context, that students just do that. Right? Just write it for me. Just use it for me. So what are some of your concerns, having all these conversations with teachers, students and your colleagues and you're in this space around the current direction of education and technologies?

Jodie Torrington: Yes. Good questions. There are a few concerns I have. If we're talking specifically A.I. there's a lot of misconceptions out there about what it is. And then a lot of viewing it as an external locus of control. In other words, you don't feel the belief that your outcomes, a contingent on either your own behaviour or an external force. In other words, like you're giving it over to the A.I. So, even the way A.I. talked about. As if it's this external locus of control. So, I think there is this need to develop the A.I. literacy and understanding, and then how to maintain that human agency, for sure.

Of course, what's coming out is this real concern that people are seeing happening of cognitive offloading. So, getting the A.I. to just do your work for you. So whether that's because of your locus of control, thinking that the A.I. is better than you. And has better output than you, and you give it that locus of control. Or whether it's just the quick fix, easy option that's marketed to everyone, and that's the only way students and teachers know to use it. You don't know, what you don't know. So unless you taught and shown. Yes, you could use it in that way, and you could get it to do everything for you. Or you could also use it in this way. More as a Socratic guide, more as a 'ask me questions', as a brainstorming partner, as a guide, as a tutor,

Ellie Meissner: Yeah. But that's certainly something you need to to learn. Right? Like someone needs to show you and have those conversations with you. Yeah. 

Jodie Torrington: And once you do and you start practicing. And this fear based narrative. We see and hear that and everyone's so scared and that comes from not quite understanding how the tool works and rightly so. It's quite the black box type of technology. But knowing that there are ways that you can, work with it or have it work with you, that helps you retain your control. And that you then believe that you can guide and steer the outputs, that's that internal locus of control. Work on showing people what that looks like and how that can be done, to sort of counter this quick fix. You know, everyone's going to take the shortest route possible. 

Ellie Meissner: Yeah. Especially in our world of overwork and overload. Yeah. 

Jodie Torrington: I would say that this has been a concern for a while too. Like we've had Google and the internet and we've seen kids copy and paste, and plagiarise, for a number of years now. Admittedly super easy now with the tool that generates the task for you. So it's even easier. Jason Lodge and Leslie Loble, their report that was just released was encouraging teachers to look at the sorts of tasks that could be cognitively offloaded. In other words, what task perhaps, isn't that urgent for deep learning? Perhaps, maybe could be offloaded. A.I. could do it for you. Maybe. And that wouldn't harm your deep learning. What would that be in your classroom? And then perhaps what tasks are crucial for that, you need to sit in that effortful process as a learner. You need to, put in that time and that hard space of work to get that deep learning. What are those parts of the task. Moving to show our students what that's going to look like, like this is the next journey. They also encourage teachers to incorporate this metacognitive scaffolding into their tasks. So making kids, you know students, anyone, stop think, reflect. That is connected to that metacognitive monitoring. That's part of self-regulated learning. So monitoring your process of learning. 

Ellie: Meissner: Yeah we can hear that Jody. Like that this is all your passion area. It really is. One of my last questions for us was about, what excites you and about the next five years and where maybe technology enhanced learning can go. And some of it you obviously already touched on because, you know, you can't just stay on the concerns, because you see so much potential and you see what's going on in the space. Is there anything else that you're really excited about thinking a few years ahead?

Jodie Torrington: My colleague Doctor Brian Ballsun-Stanton, he's just, he's a philosopher of technology, he's encouraged me to read this book called 'Rainbow's End' by Vernor Vinge. Wow. That has really opened up my thinking another notch because it's all about bringing together, a  kind of Heidegger's philosophy too of, thinking of technology, I can either think of it as, present at hand. Which means, say, if I'm holding a hammer, like, I know I'm holding a hammer, and it's very obvious to me and I'm thinking about the hammer as a tool. Like, I think that's where we are with A.I. at the moment. Like, oh, I've got to integrate A.I. and, into the class.  And rightly so. Right? We're at the beginning and it's a big minefield to navigate, I get that. But we're conscious of it, is what I'm saying. But then you move into this, 'ready to hand' where it's kind of part of you. And it's kind of, the tool becomes invisible because it's kind of just part of how you work and your day and your world. And it's, invisible because it's so integrated. With phones now. Like, you don't think twice. You just like, check the weather or you just like, you know, set your timer, or whatever. It's just kind of part of our world. And I think that, when we learn enough about how and when and why is appropriate to use A.I. and all these things. And how to use it wisely to support deep learning, and we show students, you can use it in different ways with different purposes and all of that. Then maybe, like Rainbow's End, which is society, that's it's just really at hand. How we are in the world. I don't know. 

Ellie Meissner: That's a nice vision for for the future. And unfortunately we're also coming to the end. Obviously you could talk about this for days, but we will share some links to your amazing work with our podcast as well, and people can get in touch with you if they want to have a chat or connect as well. 

Jodie Torrington: Yeah we've made a lot of practical, like posters and yeah, like I said the course and things like that, resources that are available too. 

Ellie Meissner: Yeah, amazing. So thank you so much Jodie, for joining me today, as part of our AARE podcast. And looking forward to reading more about your research. 

Jodie Torrington: Thank you. Thanks for having me.