ChatGPT Gives Answers. Our AI Tutor Asks Questions.

Summarise a lecture script, list the key terms of a chapter, produce a model answer. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools have done this for years, and that is exactly what students use them for. What stays open is whether the material has actually stuck afterwards, because a summary you have read is not yet a thought of your own. The Guide Me Through feature reverses the direction: instead of handing over a result, the tutor works through the material together with the learner.

‍

Guide Me Through can be started from any learning material. The tutor takes in the chapters of the material and then introduces one idea at a time, step by step. It then asks learners to restate or explain that idea in their own words. If the answer is off, it rephrases the question or offers a hint. It does not hand over the solution.

It only moves on to the next chapter once the topic has been understood. The course materials form the syllabus. The tutor stays within what the documents cover, and says openly when a question goes beyond them.

For teaching staff this means: the work happens with your content. Definitions, emphases and notation stay the ones from your course, and learners do not quietly pick up a second opinion from the open web.

‍

Benjamin Bloom divided content into small, sequential units, closed each one with a formative check, and followed that with targeted corrective steps before moving on. A gap you skip is a gap you carry with you. Guide Me Through therefore only moves on once the explanation holds and understanding is evident, not once the time for the tutorial has run out.

For learners this means: no fixed pace to keep up with. Familiar ground goes quickly, shaky ground gets the time it needs.

Cognitive engagement

The ICAP model by Chi and Wylie ranks learning activities by what learners are actually doing: passive, active, constructive, interactive, with expected learning outcomes rising in that order. Reading a summary is passive. Formulating your own explanation is constructive. Doing the same in conversation with a counterpart that responds to your specific answer is interactive. Guide Me Through is designed to keep the session mostly in the top two modes.

For teaching this means: the difference is not that AI is involved, but which activity it prompts in learners.

Retrieval instead of rereading

Dunlosky and colleagues assessed ten widespread study techniques against the evidence base. Two received a "high utility" rating: practice testing and distributed practice. Rereading and highlighting, the two techniques students use most often, landed in the lowest category. That is why the tutor asks considerably more than it explains, and returns to earlier chapters with follow-up questions as the material progresses.

‍

Individual tutoring is usually a question of staffing: one person supervising per learner. Guide Me Through shifts that effort, because the mode runs on material that has already been uploaded and requires no additional preparation. What you have created for your course anyway becomes the basis for the sessions.

Guide Me Through does not replace a teaching conversation with subject specialists, and it is not an assessment. The focus on the uploaded material is deliberate, but it also means: anyone who wants to work beyond the course needs a different source. And the mode requires participation. Learners looking for a quick finished answer will experience the questioning as a detour at first. That is an expectation you can address in how you introduce the tool to students.

Summaries and model answers remain useful when it comes to getting your bearings in a new chapter. For the goal of content still being remembered after the session, Bloom's model, the ICAP model and Dunlosky's review of techniques all point in the same direction: small units with a check, your own wording instead of reception, retrieval instead of rereading. Guide Me Through puts these three points into a format that builds on your own material. Whether it is worth using in your course depends on whether your learners mainly need an overview or confidence in the material.

‍