MIRA Lab

MIRA Lab, Metacognitive Instructional Regulation Agents

Epistemic Ownership
in AI‑Assisted Learning

MIRA Lab studies whether students can explain, defend, and revise the work they produce with AI. We build learning platforms that record this reasoning and deploy them in credit-bearing courses at the University of North Texas.

Ji Hyun Yu

From the director

I study how students keep ownership of their reasoning when AI can produce the work for them. I design and build the lab's platforms myself, and I run them in UNT courses so the evidence comes from real coursework.

Ji Hyun Yu, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Learning Technologies, University of North Texas

  • Editorial board, Educational Technology & Society and Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning
  • Facilitator, AMIS Community of Research
  • Lead, AI + Learning Analytics concentration, LTEC M.S.
  • Affiliated faculty, Data Science

Epistemic ownership

Epistemic ownership is a learner's capacity to explain, defend, and revise work they submit as their own.

More details

Productive friction

Productive friction is effort that a learning environment deliberately keeps with the learner because that effort produces learning.

More details

Epistemic labor redistribution

Epistemic labor redistribution is the shift of cognitive work between a learner and an AI system during a task.

More details

The fluency trap

The fluency trap is the combination of low epistemic ownership with high confidence in that ownership.

More details

Recent publications

  • Why educators use but do not endorse artificial intelligence in higher education

    Yu, J. H., Romero, P.*, Dunlap, M.*, & Warren, S. Innovative Higher Education, accepted

  • Measuring cognitive presence in online discussions: Automated detection and instructional insights from a MOOC context

    Yu, J. H., Tu, F.*, Chen, H., Ding, J., Hsieh, C-J.*, Dong, L.*, Kim, H., & Watson, S. L. Educational Technology Research and Development, accepted

  • Verification without criteria: An Epistemic Network Analysis of metacognitive laziness in Generative AI research

    Yu, J. H., Tu, F., Cheng, L., Li, S., & Zheng, Z. Online Learning Journal, accepted

All publications

News

  • Publication, Sep 2026

    Article accepted in Innovative Higher Education

  • Publication, Sep 2026

    Cognitive presence detection article published in Educational Technology Research and Development

  • Grant, Sep 2026

    IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program award for SALAMANDER

  • Talk, Jul 2026

    MIRA-Sim findings presented at the HAI-Agency Workshop, AIED 2026, Seoul

All news