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On November 3, 2026 (US time), Google made a batch of announcements about how AI is used in education. At the center is Guided Learning, a learning feature in which the AI asks questions to get students thinking for themselves rather than handing over the answer right away. It began rolling out in Google Classroom worldwide the same day. Google also shared results from a controlled trial with University of Tokyo students and a new policy on how AI is handled on accounts for younger students.
Guided Learning comes to Google Classroom
Guided Learning is a learning mode in the Gemini app. Instead of giving the answer to a problem outright, it leads students toward understanding step by step with hints and questions. It is now available in Google Classroom as well.
- Teachers can assign learning tasks based on their class materials, and students work through them with Guided Learning as if in one-on-one tutoring
- Teachers can see how the whole class is doing, including where students are getting stuck
- Conversations with the AI can follow the content of the materials the teacher has shared
Google says AI learning tools should support "productive struggle." The idea is not to hand over answers and take away the chance to think, but to give just enough help so that students can work through problems on their own.
A controlled trial with more than 300 University of Tokyo students
Google also published the results of two studies on the effects of Guided Learning.
- Japan: A randomized controlled trial on learning statistics was run with more than 300 University of Tokyo students. After a half-day of self-study, students who used only standard online materials raised their scores by 5.3 points, while students who could also use Guided Learning in the Gemini app raised theirs by 8.1 points. Google says this amounts to about 1.5x the gain from a single study session
- UK: Working with the school network Ark, Google tested Guided Learning in Google Classroom at 3 secondary schools for 4 weeks across 4 subjects. Many students who responded to the survey said they "felt comfortable asking Gemini when they got stuck," and more than half said it "helped them solve problems on their own"
Based on feedback from teachers in the UK trial, Google says it added a feature that lets teachers see how students are progressing and a feature that keeps conversations aligned with the shared materials.
Coming to Search, and off by default for younger students
Guided Learning is also coming to Google Search, where it will help students think through homework problems step by step. Google says it will start as a pilot at some US schools during November and expand to other school districts later.
School administration policy is also changing. On K-12 student accounts, Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom and AI features in Google Search will be unavailable until a school administrator explicitly turns them on. Google says it will share details with schools over the coming months, before the change takes effect.
Google also announced that Google.org, its philanthropic arm, will provide more than $9.5 million in total to 5 organizations building AI with and for teachers, and that over the coming months it will expand Google AI Educator Series, its free AI training for teachers, to Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa.
CoAI's take
The trial results from Japanese university students are useful for educators in Japan as well. However, these results were published by Google itself and have not been released as a research paper. They also come from a single half-day study session, so the long-term effects are not yet known.
The biggest worry about using generative AI in schools is that students will copy answers without thinking for themselves. A design that "doesn't give the answer right away," as with Guided Learning, and a policy of turning AI off by default on children's accounts are both attempts to address that concern. OpenAI's ChatGPT also has a learning mode, and companies are exploring what an "AI that teaches" should look like. Schools that plan to use these tools would do well to have teachers and administrators discuss which features to open up to which grades before getting started.
