David Marsh is an educational ambassador

David has been appointed one of the university's four educational ambassadors for 2026 and has been awarded the vice-chancellor's fund for quality development in education. His project aims to develop new forms of continuous assessment. “Generative AI's rapidly improving skills in physical problem solving threaten to make all forms of assignments less effective as educational tools,” says David Marsh.

David Marsh, universitetslektor och forskare på Fysikum

David Marsh, associate professor and researcher at Fysikum. Photo: Gunilla Häggström

David Marsh is a senior lecturer at Fysikum and conducts research in theoretical physics within cosmology, astroparticle physics, and fundamental physics.

Much of the discussion surrounding AI and higher education has focused on the risk of cheating and students using AI as a shortcut to “avoid” learning material. At the same time, AI tools open up exciting opportunities to develop new, effective teaching methods.

Research over the past decade has shown that students learn more if they are actively engaged in the classroom than if they are only passively listening to a lecture. We have seen strong examples of this at Fysikum: one course went from 8 out of 22 passing the exam in 2024 with a traditional approach to 29 out of 31 passing in March 2025 with a student-active approach, says David Marsh.

“Within the educational ambassador project, I will further develop a type of assignment that I have been using for the past five years. The method emphasizes intensive problem solving, verbal explanation of solutions and relevant concepts, and evaluative assessment of others' solutions through peer review,” says David.

The goal of the project is to develop a continuous form of examination that is AI-secure, or that takes advantage of AI tools, with the support of recent research. "I will explore and possibly link three educational tracks. The first is team-based learning, which has been used successfully for several years in medical education at Karolinska Institutet.

The second is two-stage examination, which involves tests with both an individual part and a part that is solved in a group. Two-stage examinations are becoming popular internationally and use the test as a learning opportunity that can strengthen students, says David.

The third part is based on a Harvard study published this summer in which half of the students were taught using research-based methods and the other half using a specially designed chatbot. "The students who interacted with the chatbot achieved twice as good results and became more engaged. The results illustrate that there is great potential for AI in teaching, for example, by allowing students to get quick feedback on their ideas, but its use needs clear pedagogical guidance, says David.
The project will run throughout 2026, with David devoting around 30% of his working hours to it.

— The idea is to implement the new form of examination in 2027. The pedagogical ambassador program will offer important support in the form of coaching and seminars. The results will likely be disseminated through workshops organized by the Center for University Teacher Education (CeUL), says David Marsh.