Research area
AI in disciplinary teaching and learning
Focus
The other three strands grow out of language education. This strand asks the same question in disciplinary courses: how do students and faculty actually use generative AI, and how can that evidence be turned into guidelines, instructional resources, and tools that support learning rather than replace it?
CLARITY: Co-attendant Learning Agent for Responsive Intelligent Tutoring
CLARITY is a multi-PI research program at Penn State, led by Dr. Andrea Gregg, Dr. Tamy Guimarães, and Dr. Xiang Yang, that generates empirical evidence on how undergraduate engineering students and faculty engage with AI in learning and teaching. As a research team member since 2026, Yuwei Xia supports mixed methods data collection and analysis, including literature reviews and synthesis across qualitative and quantitative sources; contributes to AI usage guidelines and instructional resources for engineering faculty integrating AI into their courses; and supports the iterative design of a responsive intelligent tutoring agent for concept-intensive engineering courses, alongside capstone course support and student mentoring.
- CLARITY (2026 – present), Pennsylvania State University, research team member.
AI literacy and faculty consultation
In her role as Director of the Texas State Intensive English Program, she leads workshops and individual consultations for faculty across departments, including AI literacy sessions on the responsible and effective use of AI in research, and consults with chairs and program leaders on integrating technology into writing courses. This practice feeds back into the research: the questions faculty bring to these sessions shape what the disciplinary strand studies.
Connecting threads
Across all four strands, generative AI is treated as a mediational tool whose educational value depends on how learners engage with it. The disciplinary work tests whether the design principles developed in language education, graduated support, learner authorship, and transparent tool use, hold in engineering and other fields.
Related
Writing assessment beyond AI detection · Dynamic assessment research · Concept-based instruction and L2 vocabulary