AI in education: separating the hype from the evidence

AI in education: separating the hype from the evidence

From Education Futures by Svenia Busson & Laurent Jolie

April 13, 2026 · 54 min · Season 1 · Episode 35

About this episode

Svenia Busson interviews Wess Trabelsi about the evidence surrounding AI in education and its implications for K-12 learning.

In this episode, Svenia Busson sits down with Wess Trabelsi , a Tech Integration Specialist at Ulster BOCES in New York, where he supports eight rural school districts. Wess is neither a cheerleader nor a doomsayer when it comes to AI in education, he's something rarer: an evidence-driven practitioner who actually read the research. Wess shares his deep dive into the science (or lack thereof) behind AI in K-12. After reviewing over 100 studies, he found that the vast majority are noise, glorified surveys, opinion pieces, and what he calls "dead horse studies" that prove the obvious. His findings closely mirror those of the Stanford AI Hub for Education's newly released 2026 Review, which started with 800 studies and kept only 20 with strong causal evidence, and found zero conducted in U.S. K-12 settings. Together, Svenia and Wess unpack the two most significant studies to date: the Harvard RCT showing a custom AI tutor significantly helped motivated physics students, and the landmark Wharton/Turkey study showing that AI-assisted practice gains completely disappeared when AI was removed at test time. Neither provides a clear playbook for the average classroom. But the conversation…

People in this episode

Host: Svenia Busson

Guest: Wess Trabelsi

Topics covered

  • AI in education
  • evidence-based practice
  • K-12 education
  • educational research
  • process-based learning
  • project-based learning

Keywords

  • AI in education
  • K-12
  • educational research
  • evidence-based practice
  • process-based learning
  • project-based learning
  • Stanford AI Hub
  • Harvard RCT
  • Wharton study

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Ulster BOCES, Stanford AI Hub for Education, Harvard, Wharton

Places: New York, U.S., High Tech High

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