For Educators & Faculty

Critical thinking, built into your course.

It's easy to fake a competent essay. An intelligent, dynamic dialogue is a more robust measure of knowledge. Cogito engages students in meaningful conversation on your curriculum and evaluates student knowledge based on their participation. Rather than AI trying to replace the student, this is AI challenging and scaffolding the student.

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Socratic Practicum Bloom's Taxonomy Individual Session Reports

Course · Finance 301

Reading a 10-K filing

Your lecture and readings, exactly as you teach them.

Live coaching session

What in the 10-K actually backs the "significant risk" claim?
They point to a subscription drop, but don't separate it from the price increase that year.

Coaching Session Report

Argument Analyst

84/100
Evidence8/10
Assumptions9/10

What a 15-minute session produces

The 2-Sigma Question

Bloom's 2 sigma, in the age of AI.

For a century, the essay stood in for the reasoning behind it. That deal is off: a chatbot drafts the paper from one prompt, and the artifact no longer proves a student can think. AI has even closed much of the content-mastery gap that one-on-one tutoring used to own: a 2025 randomized Harvard study of a well-designed tutor reported gains of 0.73 to 1.3 standard deviations, still short of Bloom's famous two. What AI does not close is the judgment a good tutor builds: asking a sharper question, spotting a weak argument, defending a decision under pressure. That is the practicum Cogito runs after every lesson, with a scored Coaching Session Report of how the student reasoned, not what they recalled.

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What replaces the essay

See the session. Grade the reasoning.

Every session ends with a Coaching Session Report. It is a teaching tool first, an evidence record second: the student leaves knowing exactly where their thinking can sharpen, and you keep the proof of growth.

  • The reasoning, scored. Not whether they showed up, but how they argued, move by move.
  • Follow-up prompts. Specific questions to practice the same skill next, so the learning continues.
  • Progress over time. How this session compares to the last, per student, across the term.

Cogito doesn't replace your judgment. It surfaces evidence of reasoning the final artifact never showed you, and the call on what it means stays yours.

See the full report

Three coaches, three thinking skills

Each coach trains a higher-order skill you already assess.

These are the upper tiers of Bloom's taxonomy: the levels every syllabus claims and few practicums actually exercise. Each coach lives in one of them.

Ask

Curiosity Coach

Higher-order: Analyze

Students learn to ask probing, precise questions instead of taking the first answer. The Socratic discipline Paul and Elder built a whole framework around, practiced one question at a time.

Investigate

Argument Analyst

Higher-order: Evaluate

Students weigh evidence, name the persuasion technique in play, and tell a strong argument from a merely fluent one. The skill an AI-saturated information environment demands.

Decide

Decision Coach

Higher-order: Create

Students reason under uncertainty, surface their own assumptions, and catch the bias steering the call. Judgment, practiced as a repeatable method.

What Cogito adds to your course

Your course teaches the material. Cogito turns it into reasoning you can see.

Your course already has the material, the readings, the outcomes. What it can't do on its own is make a student reason through it out loud, under questioning, and leave a record of how they thought. Participation metrics (annotations, discussion posts, word counts) only prove a student showed up, and a chatbot fakes all of them in seconds. Cogito adds a live coaching practicum to the course you already teach: same syllabus, same outcomes, but the reasoning now happens where you can see it, and by the end of the term you hold a growth chart of how each student thinks, not a gradebook of who finished.

How it fits your course

Drop a thinking practicum into any topic you teach.

No new curriculum to write. You bring the subject and the outcome; Cogito runs the practice and produces the evidence. The coaching is anchored to your course: students are questioned on the material they are actually studying, so the practice happens inside the class, not beside it.

Choose the skill

Pick the coach that matches your learning outcome, then map it to the level on your syllabus.

Students reason for 15 min

They work through your material in a live Socratic dialogue. The coach pushes back, asks for evidence, and names the move they missed. No answers handed over.

You get a scored report

Every session ends with the Coaching Session Report: how the student reasoned, where they got stuck, what to practice next. It is generated automatically, so there are no transcripts to grade by hand.

Bloom's Taxonomy Socratic Method Outcome-Aligned Assessment Backward Design

Getting started

No IT ticket. No new syllabus. Live this week.

Setup is light enough to run your first coached session in days, not a term. Nothing to install, and no LMS integration to wait on.

Curious what a session feels like?

Try a live coaching session

How it's verified

Not a prototype. It runs in real classrooms.

In a live university course, students came back to the coach session after session and reasoned through real material, not canned exercises. The most telling moment was not a number: a student caught a flaw in their own design before the coach pointed it out.

  • Anchored to your course. The coach questions students on their actual coursework, not generic material.
  • Scored to the thinking. Every session grades how the student reasoned, against the higher-order tiers your syllabus already targets.
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From a live university class

Did the coaching change how students think?

A student caught a flaw in their own design before the coach raised it.

They reached it on their own, with the coach pushing rather than answering. That is reasoning a finished essay never shows you, and the kind your students would bring back to the rest of your course.

One university course, around 38 students, returning for repeated coaching sessions across the term.

In students' words

The shift shows up in how they ask.

Translated, anonymized end-of-term responses from students in a university course, on what changed in how they think and ask.

"I used to just demand the answer. Now I realize this applies to any AI I use: I can't simply ask for an answer, I have to think more deeply first."

Student, university programming course

"I've started watching my own reasoning. Mid-problem I'll catch myself: 'I applied that formula directly, which might be wrong.'"

Student, university programming course

"At first my questions were vague, like 'how do I draw a lake?' Now I can pinpoint it: 'my lake outline looks rigid, how can I make the edges more natural?'"

Student, university programming course

Bring critical thinking into your next class.

Start free. Set up your account, run the first coached session, and read the report the moment it finishes.

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