From Cognitive Surrender to Agency: Your Judgment with AI

Tina Austin leads research on metacognition, human judgment, and independent thinking in AI-mediated learning. She created UnBlooms™, a peer-reviewed framework that helps educators make student thinking visible and assess what learners can do independently when they use AI.

She leads a global AI Assessment Redesign group and an international longitudinal research consortium studying how human capabilities develop over time. Her work helps educators design assessments that show when learners decide to offload thinking, how they evaluate AI output, and what they can do on their own.

Tina is an author, researcher, and Director of AI Education & Learning Systems in Public Interest Technology at UCLA. She has taught at UCLA, USC, CSU, and Caltech.

Steven Shaw is an Assistant Professor at King’s College London and coiner of ‘cognitive surrender’. In this joint lesson, he introduces the construct and recognizable examples of surrender in AI-assisted work. Tina Austin connects those examples to metacognition and practical judgment checks. Together they apply Recognize → Intervene → Demonstrate to shared scenarios.