Three Pathways of Student-AI Interaction: Constraint-First Design for Higher-Order Thinking

Abstract

How students interact with artificial intelligence (AI) systems in educational settings may determine whether that interaction supports or displaces critical thinking. This paper introduces two contributions. The first is the Three Paths of Student-AI Interaction, a typological framework identifying three qualitatively distinct modes of student-AI engagement: Passive Review, Direct Question, and Strategic Dialogue. The second is the Next Level Teaching Blueprint (NLTB), a three-stage instructional design system intended to make Strategic Dialogue more likely. Qualitative content analysis of 50 randomly sampled student-AI interaction messages from an undergraduate research methods course was used to examine the typology. Two human coders achieved 68% path-level agreement ($\kappa$ = .48), with 80% agreement on Strategic Dialogue identification specifically. GPT-5, used as a third coder, produced a similar overall distribution and introduced a coding category absent from the human scheme. Path 1 (Passive Review) accounted for 46% of exchanges in the primary researcher's classifications, Path 2 (Direct Question) for 18%, and Path 3 (Strategic Dialogue) for 36%. A second, descriptively examined dataset contained predominantly Strategic Dialogue content, offering a preliminary indication that instructional framing may influence which path students take. Together, the Three Paths framework and the NLTB contribute a language for describing student-AI interaction and a design approach for supporting higher-order engagement.