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Welcome to the AI in Education podcast With Dan Bowen and Ray Fleming. It's a weekly chat about Artificial Intelligence in Education for educators and education leaders. Also available through Apple Podcasts and Spotify. "This podcast is co-hosted by an employee of Microsoft Australia & New Zealand, but all the views and opinions expressed on this podcast are their own.”

Feb 19, 2026

Research Update: 8 papers on AI in Education you need to know for 2026
 
In this episode, Ray and Dan provide a rapid-fire rundown of the most significant research papers hitting the AI in Education space so far in 2026. After a series of news-heavy episodes, the hosts catch up on the data behind synthetic avatars, grading accuracy, and the psychological biases we hold against AI.
 
Key highlights include:
 
Synthetic Lecturers: Exploring stakeholder perspectives on digital twins and the emotional reaction to the term Deepfake in academia.
 
The Grading Gap: Why ChatGPT tends to be more sycophantic and generous with weak work compared to human instructors.
 
The Disclosure Penalty: New findings from 16 experiments showing why humans devalue creative writing the moment they know AI is involved.
 
Prompting Hacks: The "Groundhog Day" method 😂 Why simply repeating your prompt twice can boost accuracy across 70 different AI systems.
 
Tools for Researchers: Insights into Jasper Roe’s research checklist and the "Paper Banana" tool for automating scientific diagrams.
 
Links to all the research papers discussed