Ryan Thomas Lee is an educator based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and a postgraduate researcher in the Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health MSc programme at King's College London. He is the founder of JAI Behavioural, an advisory consultancy developing evidence-based cognitive and institutional governance frameworks for international schools. His empirical audit of AI policy across Southeast Asia and the Middle East is forthcoming in the proceedings of IEEE SAMYRAD 2026.
When evaluating how the education sector manages generative artificial intelligence, the data reveals a critical misalignment between policy and developmental science. In a recent audit of 99 independent international schools across Southeast Asia and the Middle East, 89 institutions possessed no standalone AI policy (1). In rare cases where guidelines did exist, they were overwhelmingly tethered to traditional academic integrity and plagiarism clauses.
Educational leadership has been focusing almost entirely on the integrity of assessment by treating generative AI as a cheating device. Whilst this is important, in doing so, the same institutions have created a massive developmental blind spot regarding the cognitive architecture of the students.
Tools to support cognitive demand are nothing new. So, what is cognitive offloading? The act of relying on the external environment to alter our information processing requirements. Developing cognition is a foundational element of human intelligence (2). A calculator is a classic…
Source: The Learning Scientists — Read the full article on the original site ↗