The A³™
(AI-Aware Assessment) Framework
Designing AI-Resilient Learning

The Challenge of Assessment in the AI Era

 

In a world where generative AI tools like ChatGPT can produce decent essays, summaries, and answers on demand, traditional assessment models are facing a crisis of purpose. If a student can outsource their homework to an AI, what are we actually assessing?

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The answer is not to ban AI—an approach that is both unrealistic and ill-equipped for the future workplace. Instead, educators must redesign tasks to ensure that human thinking remains central to the learning process.

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Introducing A³™: AI-Aware Assessment

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Developed by The Urban Historian, the A³™ (AI-Aware Assessment) framework is a pedagogical standard designed for the Humanities classroom in the age of artificial intelligence.

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A³ assumes that students will have access to AI tools. Instead of ignoring this reality, A³ asks a fundamental question about every assignment: What parts of this task must still be done by a human mind?

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The framework shifts the assessment focus away from the product and toward the process. 

Basically the final answer has less focus as more attention will be spent on how the final answer was derived. 

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The Three Pillars of A³™

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A³ structures academic tasks into three distinct layers of cognitive work, creating natural checkpoints where student thinking must be made visible.

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1. ABSORB™ – “What do I see or know?”

The Goal: Foundational comprehension and evidence gathering. Students must focus on understanding the material in front of them such as reading a historical source, analyzing a data set, or observing a diagram and picking out key details accurately.

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• The Human Task: Identifying reliable sources, extracting relevant facts, and describing what is literally present in the stimulus material.

• The Role of AI: Supportive. AI is permitted in a limited capacity, such as defining difficult vocabulary or summarizing lengthy texts to aid basic access to the content.

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2. ANALYSE™ – “What does this tell me?”

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The Goal: Interpretation, connection, and evaluation. Students move beyond surface details to consider deeper meaning. This is the "think about it" layer where students must weigh evidence, detect bias, and infer purpose.

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• The Human Task: Inferring perspective, explaining the significance of evidence, and deciding which pieces of information matter most to the question.

• The Role of AI: Thinking Partner. AI may be used to brainstorm possible interpretations or suggest different angles, but the student must evaluate, choose, or reject those ideas.

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3. ARGUE™ – “How do I explain my thinking?”

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The Goal: Judgment, justification, and communication. This is where A³ deliberately centres human judgment. Students must commit to a position, construct a logical argument, and defend their conclusion using evidence gathered in previous steps.

• The Human Task: Making value-based decisions (e.g., "To what extent do you agree?"), articulating reasoning in their own voice, and defending a conclusion against counter-arguments.

• The Role of AI: Restricted. While AI might be used to tidy grammar at the very end, the structure of the argument, the choice of evidence, and the final judgment must belong entirely to the student.

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Why A³™ Works for Modern Classrooms

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By breaking down tasks into Absorb, Analyse, and Argue, educators gain several advantages:

• Making Thinking Visible: Teachers can see exactly where a student is struggling. For e.g. is it a failure to gather evidence (Absorb) or a weakness in logical structuring (Argue)?

• AI-Resilience: It becomes much harder for a student to simply copy-paste a prompt into a chatbot and submit the result. The layered nature of A³ requires iterative human input and decision-making at every stage.

• Real-World Preparation: Students learn to treat AI not as an answer-generator, but as a tool that supports their critical thinking faculties.

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Integrated with Lexa

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The A³™ framework is the pedagogical engine powering Lexa, our digital platform for Humanities education. Lexa’s interface is built directly around these three stages, allowing teachers to deploy AI-aware source-based questions and structured essays with ease.

By using Lexa, you ensure that students are engaging with the right cognitive skills at the right time, keeping the "human in the loop" of learning.