AI Formative Assessment Studio: Designing Socratic AI Dialogue for Learner Understanding
About This Course
AI tools often give answers too quickly. This CPD is positioned for educators, trainers, and learning developers who want to use GenAI to support guided thinking, not to replace facilitation or run a technical chatbot-building project. Its value lies in designing how AI should ask, prompt, pause, and hand back responsibility to the learner.
Participants diagnose scaffolding needs through a structured five-step ZPD analysis, design question sequences using Paul & Elder and Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, plan fading from full support to independence, and embed lightweight formative checks that surface learner understanding.
They also consider wellbeing indicators such as over-reliance, cognitive overload, and isolation, with clear pathways back to human support.
The course is deliberately tool-agnostic. Participants may test their Socratic designs through peer role-play, guided-learning features, or simple AI tutor/agent prompts or configurations, but the focus remains on pedagogical quality: how the educator structures dialogue, monitors learner readiness, and keeps human support visible.
Participants leave with a reusable Socratic facilitation toolkit, including a ZPD analysis, scaffolding-fading plan, question sequence, AI-assisted dialogue prompt or configuration, low-stakes formative checks, and a concise safeguards checklist.
What You'll Learn
Participants apply Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) as a structured five-step analysis (establishing independent performance, introducing graduated scaffolds, examining responsiveness to support, fading support, and testing transfer) to analyse where learners need scaffolding and design a fading continuum that moves learners from supported thinking to independent performance. The ZPD analysis is used as a practical facilitation lens; participants are not taught to measure ZPD with a tool, but to infer scaffolding needs from learner performance, responsiveness to support, and transfer. Using Paul & Elder question types and Bloom's Revised Taxonomy, they construct question sequences that prompt explanation, challenge assumptions, surface misconceptions, and check understanding.
The course will explore the Learning/Study Mode, or Guided Learning features in common GenAI platforms, where available, and develop simple AI tutors or agents to test the pedagogy in an applied practice environment.
Participants complete an individual written assignment during the course and submit it through Google Classroom, producing practical evidence they can adapt for their own adult education, training, or learning development workflow.
Entry Requirements
• Adult educators, trainers, and facilitators who want to strengthen Socratic questioning, coaching, and guided practice with AI.
• Learning designers and instructional designers creating learner-facing practice activities, guided support experiences, or formative learning interactions.
• Learning coaches, mentors, and tutors who support learners during practice, revision, blended learning, or self-directed study.
• L&D managers, QA leads, and programme managers setting responsible AI practices for learner support and formative assessment.
• Educators responsible for learner engagement, wellbeing, academic support, or safe use of AI-assisted learning dialogue.