Independent judgment before viewing generative AI recommendations reduces susceptibility to misleading advice: a randomized scenario-based experiment with preservice teachers.

Authors

Dong Yan

Published in

Frontiers in psychology. Volume 17. Pages 1936522. Epub Sep 28, 2026.

Abstract

Generative AI can support preservice teachers' pedagogical decisions, but fluent recommendations may also redirect attention away from diagnostic classroom evidence. We compared an independent-judgment-before-recommendation sequence with a recommendation-before-judgment sequence under expert-keyed and misleading generative AI recommendations.
A three-arm randomized scenario-based experiment enrolled 240 preservice teachers from one Chinese university. Group A recorded an independent judgment before viewing an AI recommendation, Group B viewed the recommendation before its first recorded judgment, and Group C completed the tasks without AI as a contextual benchmark and did not enter the primary sequence × recommendation-quality hypothesis test. Groups A and B completed 12 fixed-order items, including six expert-keyed and six misleading recommendations. Expert-keyed joint accuracy-agreement with the expert-designated plan and rationale-was the primary outcome. After data-quality exclusions, 218 participants remained in the main analysis. Participant-clustered logistic generalized estimating equations tested sequence, recommendation quality, and their interaction.
Under misleading recommendations, Group A had higher expert-keyed joint accuracy than Group B, OR = 1.912, 95% CI [1.413, 2.589], p < 0.001. The estimate remained significant among all 160 randomized A/B participants with available outcomes, OR = 1.814, 95% CI [1.345, 2.448], p < 0.001, and was similar after version adjustment. The difference appeared in both final plan accuracy and final rationale accuracy. Group A was also less likely to reproduce the misleading recommendation completely, OR = 0.403, 95% CI [0.296, 0.549], p < 0.001. Under expert-keyed recommendations, the between-group contrast was not statistically significant, OR = 0.821, 95% CI [0.598, 1.128], p = 0.225.
Recording an independent judgment before viewing AI was associated with lower susceptibility to misleading recommendations in the selected controlled scenarios. The result supports further evaluation of independent-first workflows in teacher education, but it does not isolate a single cognitive mechanism or establish transfer to authentic classroom decision-making. These findings extend research on cognitive-forcing designs to contextualized pedagogical judgments that require both instructional action selection and evidence-based justification.

PMID:
42865604
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 13 Oct 2026.

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