It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, June 23, 2026
As AI adoption accelerates, new SRI report examines what makes AI trustworthy
As governments, companies, and public institutions move from experimenting with AI to deploying it in the real world, one question is becoming increasingly urgent:
What does it mean to trust AI? And what does it take for that trust to be earned?
A new white paper published by the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (SRI) at the University of Toronto reframes trust as a multidisciplinary, institutional challenge at the center of AI adoption and governance.
The report, Trust in human–artificial intelligence interactions: A multidisciplinary approach, offers a comprehensive framework for understanding and building trust in artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
Developed by a working group of graduate and postdoctoral researchers convened by SRI, and led by Research Lead Beth Coleman, the publication arrives at a critical juncture in Canadian AI policy. It provides policymakers, developers, and researchers with an actionable, six-part interdisciplinary framework to ensure AI systems are designed and governed to be genuinely trustworthy rather than merely trusted.
The paper identifies six principles that shape how trust is built, maintained, and broken: reliability and competence; contextual awareness; transparency, accountability, and legitimacy; fairness and integrity; resilience; and relational dynamics.
"Trust in AI is often framed as a user attitude or interface challenge, but our analysis shows that trust must be grounded in demonstrated system performance, clear governance, and institutional responsibility," says Beth Coleman, lead author of the report and professor at the University of Toronto. "AI systems should not simply seek trust—they must be designed and governed to earn it."
The report brings together perspectives from computer science, engineering, psychology, sociology, law, public policy, history, and philosophy. The work was developed through an interdisciplinary working group of graduate and postdoctoral researchers convened by SRI.
The white paper marks an important step in SRI’s continuing work on AI and society through Coleman’sAI & Trust Working Group, which brings together over 70 international researchers, policymakers, industry leaders, and civil society actors. The group works across geopolitical sectors to develop robust, applicable frameworks for AI and trust, support international policy engagement, and produce public-facing guidance for practitioners and decision-makers.
"I created this group because the need for international, interdisciplinary work on AI and trust seemed clear," says Coleman. "The response was incredible, with interest spanning three continents and multiple time zones."
The release comes amid growing international discussions about AI governance, public confidence, and technological sovereignty. In Canada, trust has emerged as a central theme in the federal government's new National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, which identifies trust as essential to responsible AI adoption and deployment.
The report further argues that policymakers, researchers, and organizations should shift focus away from increasing public trust in AI and toward developing AI systems that are demonstrably trustworthy.
ABOUT THE SCHWARTZ REISMAN INSTITUTE FOR TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY
The Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (SRI) at the University of Toronto is an interdisciplinary research hub that examines the social impacts of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence. SRI integrates research across a wide range of disciplines to foster insights towards safe and responsible AI innovation, developing policy-oriented solutions to better align powerful technologies with human values and harness their potential to improve life—for everyone.
DeepFake technology has grown so sophisticated that AI-generated faces can now fool both human eyes and many detection systems—but a more insidious problem lurks beneath the surface: these detectors don't treat everyone equally. A landmark international competition organized at the NeurIPS 2025 conference has revealed that AI systems designed to spot fake faces perform unevenly across demographic groups, with lighter-skinned individuals enjoying higher accuracy while darker-skinned faces are more frequently misclassified. The competition brought together 158 researchers from 20 countries to tackle fairness in DeepFake detection, with surprising results that challenge how we evaluate these critical tools.
Recent studies have documented significant demographic biases in DeepFake detection—for example, systems achieving higher accuracy on lighter-skinned faces while producing disproportionately high false positive rates for darker-skinned individuals. These disparities have real-world consequences: unfair detection tools could subject minority communities to increased surveillance, wrongful content removal, or unjust accusations. Meanwhile, fairness algorithms developed in machine learning have seen limited application in this domain, and even when applied, they often fail under distribution shifts as generative AI models evolve. Due to these challenges, researchers recognized an urgent need to systematically investigate fairness in AI-generated face detection.
Now, a comprehensive analysis of the competition has been published (DOI: 10.1007/s11633-026-1637-x) in Machine Intelligence Research . The competition, organized by researchers from Purdue University, University at Buffalo, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and other institutions, challenged participants to build DeepFake detectors that perform fairly across gender and skin tone groups while maintaining detection accuracy. The results reveal that the most successful teams prioritized fairness metrics in ways that exposed fundamental flaws in current evaluation protocols.
The competition provided participants with the AI-Face dataset—the first million-scale demographically annotated dataset of AI-generated faces, containing over 1.2 million fake images produced by 37 different generation methods (including Generative Adversarial Networks, GANs, and Diffusion Models, DMs) alongside 400,000 real faces. Teams were evaluated on four fairness metrics—demographic parity, equalized odds, max equalized odds, and overall accuracy equality—across six intersectional groups defined by gender and skin tone. The top-ranked solution combined three strategies: careful data curation that excluded certain GAN and DM datasets to reduce noise, a mixture-of-experts architecture fusing ConvNeXt and EfficientNet backbones, and test-time augmentation with max aggregation. However, the competition's most striking finding was that the top two teams achieved near-perfect fairness scores by simply classifying every image as fake—a strategy that exploits the fixed 0.5 decision threshold, yielding 50% accuracy and 100% false positive rates. Other teams explored complementary approaches: foundation-model-based feature extraction using CLIP and DINOv3, dual-branch fusion of global and local cues, prompt-based debiasing with frozen backbones, and ensemble learning.
"The competition revealed a troubling reality—teams could achieve perfect fairness scores by sacrificing utility entirely, simply by predicting every image as fake," the authors said. "This tells us that our current evaluation framework is fundamentally broken. If we want fairness that actually matters in the real world, we need metrics that penalize trivial solutions and reward systems that are both fair and functional. The winning approach wasn't about fairness constraints—it was about smart data curation, architectural design, and test-time augmentation. That's a lesson for the entire field."
The findings carry urgent implications for real-world deployment. Social media platforms, news organizations, and government agencies increasingly rely on DeepFake detection to combat misinformation—but biased detectors could amplify rather than mitigate harm. The competition demonstrated that fairness can be improved through strategic system design, yet current evaluation methods remain vulnerable to gaming. For practitioners, this means adopting more nuanced evaluation protocols that consider both utility and fairness simultaneously, rather than optimizing one at the expense of the other. The authors advocate for Pareto frontier analysis, where teams report multiple utility-fairness trade-off points, enabling more meaningful comparisons. As generative AI continues to evolve at breakneck speed, the race is on to build detection systems that are not only accurate but truly fair.
The USA National Science Foundation (NSF) (No. IIS-2434967) and the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot and Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Lonestar6, USA.
Machine Intelligence Research (original title: International Journal of Automation and Computing) is published by Springer and sponsored by the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The journal publishes high-quality papers on original theoretical and experimental research, targets special issues on emerging topics, and strives to bridge the gap between theoretical research and practical applications.
Bar plot of average sectoral AI Startup Exposure (AISE) for industries in the US economy, where blue and green indicate lower to intermediate exposure, yellow to red indicate high exposure.
A study of funded AI startups provides a glimpse of which jobs may be most affected by AI. As AI tools are embraced by industry after industry, the impacts of these tools on jobs remain unclear. Previous analyses have focused on the theoretical capabilities of LLMs, but social factors are also likely play a role in shaping what aspects of work see AI integration—or full automation. Enrico Maria Fenoaltea and colleagues validated a version of Meta’s Llama3 LLM, which they used to cross reference products developed by AI startups backed by the venture capital firm Y Combinator with descriptions of essential tasks for various jobs drawn from the O*NET occupational database. Because AI products that have attracted significant funding are seen by investors as economically viable and socially appealing, these products are more likely to become marketplace realities than other theoretical uses for AI.
The resulting Occupational AI Startup Exposure (AISE) index seeks to capture the potential near-future AI exposure of occupations. “Exposure” could include AI complementing or substituting for human labor in performing a job. Occupations with high AI exposure include office clerks, data scientists, computer and information systems managers, and market research analysts and marketing specialists. Occupations with low AI exposure include those primarily composed of manual tasks, such as athletes, chefs, and construction workers. Compared with indices based on the theoretical abilities of AI, the AISE predicts lower exposure for occupations requiring high levels of responsibility and ethical decision-making and occupations requiring a master’s degree or higher and significant experience.
While LLMs could theoretically perform many of the tasks completed by high school teachers, judges, or marriage counselors, people may be reluctant to trust AI with roles that require social skills, judgment, or ethically charged decision-making. According to the authors, rather than hitting the entire economy as an indiscriminate technological wave, AI will gradually spread into the economy, its path shaped by social factors as much as by the technical feasibility of AI applications.
Journal
PNAS Nexus
Article Title
Follow the money: A startup-based measure of AI exposure across occupations, industries, and regions
Article Publication Date
23-Jun-2026
Tool predicting NHS staff resignations scoops top AI prize
Following a landmark collaboration between the University of Reading and the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust
The University of Reading team, including Professor Shixuan Wang and Associate Professor Rita Fontinha from Henley Business School, and Dr Son-Kien Nguyen
A landmark collaboration between the University of Reading and the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust (RBFT) has been crowned The Alconics AI Enterprise Business of the Year at the National AI Awards 2026, one of the highest accolades in UK artificial intelligence.
The award recognises "Improving Staff Retention at the RBFT", a project that harnesses AI to tackle one of the NHS's most pressing challenges: keeping skilled staff in post.
The team built an AI forecasting tool that predicts the likelihood of staff resigning, giving managers an early warning system to intervene before someone leaves. The tool also highlights the specific factors driving an individual's risk of leaving, so HR teams can see why a prediction has been made rather than treating the AI as a black box.
Professor Shixuan Wang, University of Reading, said: "This award reflects what's possible when academic expertise in AI and forecasting is applied directly to a real problem facing the NHS. Our model doesn't just predict who might leave, it shows managers why, so they can act early and make a genuine difference to people's working lives."
RBFT employs around 7,500 staff and provides acute and specialist care across Berkshire, serving a population of around a million people. Like much of the healthcare sector, the Trust has faced high staff turnover, which disrupts patient care and drives up recruitment and temporary staffing costs. Its existing HR processes relied on reactive reporting, meaning managers often only learned about retention problems after staff had already decided to leave.
The project supports the goals of the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan, which aims to stabilise the healthcare workforce, reduce reliance on temporary staff, and protect continuity of care for patients.
Paul Da Gama, Chief People Officer at Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We’re proud to see this innovative work recognised nationally. Retaining our staff is a key challenge, and this project is helping us to better understand our workforce and supports the NHS long term workforce plan.”
Winners were announced online on 9 June, with a celebratory reception held the following day at the AI Summit London, the UK's largest gathering for AI professionals and innovators.
The University of Reading team, including Professor Shixuan Wang and Associate Professor Rita Fontinha from Henley Business School, and Dr Son-Kien Nguyen, attended the ceremony. Professor Shixuan Wang brought world-leading experience in data analytics and developing AI solutions. Associate Professor Rita Fontinha provided vital Strategic HRM insights, grounded in her extensive published research on the quality of working life. Dr Son-Kien Nguyen was employed as the Research Assistant for the project, and he has been instrumental for the success of the project by data analysis, model development, and model deployment. This expertise was perfectly matched by RBFT’s operational leadership, including Peter Sandham in the staff experience, Arran Rogers in nursing informatics, along with Faraz Rasihi and Donna Kellman in workforce data.
Fergus Bruce, CEO of The National AI Awards, said: “Entries for the 2026 National AI Awards were hugely impressive with companies spanning a huge range of industries and innovations. As organisations increasingly look to AI to solve real-world challenges, it is more important than ever to demonstrate measurable value, responsible innovation and tangible business results. Winners this year really did demonstrate the tangible value and outcomes from AI innovation. Attending the AI Summit highlighted how far the UK has progressed in just the last 12 months alone regarding innovation and expertise and we’re so excited to see this continue into 2027.”
Psychologists shouldn't replace thinking with AI
‘Research based on artificial intelligence models will never be an adequate substitute for understanding and replicating human thought’
For some psychologists, it's becoming more common to use AI systems to replace human thinking in research. That's a very risky choice based on misconceptions, warn Iris van Rooij and Olivia Guest in a new paper appearing today in Current Directions in Psychological Science. ‘Research based on artificial intelligence models will never be an adequate substitute for understanding and replicating human thought.’
The technology companies behind the latest popular artificial intelligence models often make big promises, such as claiming to have developed artificial minds that can rival human brains. ‘That's a promise that can be very alluring to psychologists’, explains Iris van Rooij, professor of computational cognitive science at Radboud University. ‘It's easy to think you can do psychological experiments with artificial participants, but you simply can’t automate science.’
‘Following the replication crisis [where it was found that many results in peer-reviewed studies in psychology could not be reproduced], some researchers are pushing for a more methodological, statistical approach to psychology research, something that can be proceduralised and maybe even automated’, says Olivia Guest, associate professor of computational cognitive science at Radboud University. ‘But the whole point of doing science is to produce knowledge. That’s why it’s so important to emphasise AI can never meaningfully replicate human cognition.’
Identifying traps
In their paper, Van Rooij and Guest point out three traps to avoid for fellow researchers in their field. ‘First, AI systems are not minds. As we’ve discussed in our previous research, AI systems can never be sufficiently trained to reach human-level cognition. Even if tech companies continue to use astronomical levels of resources to train them, they won’t even be able to get close’, says van Rooij. ‘At best, you’ll be able to produce a decoy: something that may look impressive and trick you into thinking it can act like a human, but in no way a replacement for the real thing.’
Guest adds: ‘Furthermore, these systems are based on predicting, that’s not a basis for actual new theories. Just because an AI system can predict what a human would say or do, doesn’t mean it can explain what humans do. Compare it for example to the tides. Long before humans understood what caused the tides, we created tide tables to predict when ebb and flood would happen. But no one would argue that those tables explain the tides – yet that’s what some people are claiming AI models do.’
Science is slow
And finally, the researchers warn that it’s a fallacy to think that cognitive science can be automated. Guest: ‘Doing theoretical work is very difficult, and sometimes researchers might fall for instant gratification, or maybe they haven’t been taught how to do it. But if you ask AI to take over, you run into many risks, from getting stuck in existing theories to deskilling future scientists. It creates inconsistencies, which runs the risk of introducing pseudoscientific ideas into the field.’
If we truly want to advance the study of cognition, the authors argue, we can’t rely on AI models to take shortcuts. Van Rooij: ‘Part of the problem is inherent to the system: we ask researchers to write as many papers as possible, while good science is slow. But we can’t rely on AI as if it’s a cheat code, and the best way to avoid the traps of AI is to be aware of them. Only once we’ve acknowledged that can we expect to move cognitive science forward.’
Under the agreement, Insilico will leverage its proprietary Pharma.AI platform, which spans target validation, generative chemistry, and molecule optimization, together with its preclinical drug discovery expertise to discover, design, and optimize novel candidates for neuroimmune indications. SK Biopharmaceuticals will contribute its extensive development and clinical capabilities in neuroimmune disorders, steering the late-stage development and commercialization of all resulting programs. Together, the two companies aim to accelerate discovery timelines and advance next-generation therapies for patients worldwide.
Insilico Medicine ("Insilico",3696.HK), a clinical-stage generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, and SK Biopharmaceuticals, a Korean-based company leads the way in biotech innovation with groundbreaking drug research, development, and commercialization worldwide, announced a research and development collaboration at the BIO 2026 International Convention to discover AI-enabled innovative drug candidates in the neuroimmune area of the central nervous system (CNS).
Neuroimmune disorders, including neuroinflammatory, neurodegenerative, and rare neurological disorders, remain among the most challenging therapeutic areas in modern medicine, with significant unmet patient need and historically low clinical success rates.
Under the agreement, Insilico will leverage its proprietary Pharma.AI platform, which spans target validation, generative chemistry, and molecule optimization, together with its preclinical drug discovery expertise to discover, design, and optimize novel candidates for neuroimmune indications. SK Biopharmaceuticals will contribute its extensive development and clinical capabilities in neuroimmune disorders, steering the late-stage development and commercialization of all resulting programs. Together, the two companies aim to accelerate discovery timelines and advance next-generation therapies for patients worldwide.
Financially, Insilico will be eligible to receive up to $18 million in upfront and near-term milestone payments. The total potential deal value exceeds $2.5 billion, including development, regulatory, and commercial milestone payments, as well as single-digit royalties on net sales upon commercialization. Notably, the partnership sets a record by total potential deal value that Insilico has secured with APAC partners to date.
“This collaboration represents an important milestone in expanding our growth beyond epilepsy into new CNS therapeutic areas, building on the deep CNS expertise we have established through the successful development and commercialization of Cenobamate,” said Donghoon Lee, President and CEO of SK Biopharmaceuticals. “By combining Insilico’s AI-powered drug discovery platform with SK Biopharmaceuticals’ clinical development and U.S. commercialization capabilities, we believe we can accelerate the discovery of innovative CNS therapies for patients. Beyond a single program, we see this collaboration as a scalable and repeatable growth platform that can be leveraged for future target discovery and development opportunities.”
“We are delighted to announce this great news at the 2026 BIO International Convention, which underscores the tremendous power of industry communication and collaboration in accelerating progress in healthcare,” said Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, founder, co-CEO, and CBO of Insilico Medicine. “SK Biopharmaceuticals is a visionary partner, merging global leadership and commercialization expertise with a forward-thinking embrace of AI. By uniting Insilico’s AI-driven target-to-candidate engine with SK Biopharmaceuticals’ deep CNS mastery, we aim to unlock breakthrough therapies, spanning both traditional small molecules and advanced new modalities, to address critical patient needs.”
As an AI-native biotechnology company, Insilico is redefining the efficiency of preclinical drug development through its advanced AI and automation platform, setting a new standard for the industry. While traditional early-stage drug discovery typically takes 2.5 to 4 years, Insilico has consistently reached preclinical candidate (PCC) nomination in an average of just 12 to 18 months, with only 60 to 200 molecules synthesized and tested per program. Since 2021, the company has nominated 31 PCCs, 13 of which have received IND approval or clearance.
While expanding the practical applications of its technology in drug discovery and life science research, Insilico is also continuously enhancing the performance of its AI platform. Drawing on extensive experience and datasets from its training platform, the company has distilled thousands of benchmarks and integrated them into MMAI Gym. Serving as both a “trainer and benchmark” for scientific AI, MMAI Gym enables organizations to train models for domain-specific reasoning while rigorously evaluating their performance on real-world tasks, advancing the path toward pharma superintelligence. To date, Human Longevity and Liquid AI have collaborated with Insilico, joining as partners of MMAI Gym.
About Insilico Medicine
Insilico Medicine is a pioneering global biotechnology company dedicated to integrating artificial intelligence and automation technologies to accelerate drug discovery, drive innovation in the life sciences, and extend healthy longevity to people on the planet. The company was listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on December 30, 2025, under the stock code 03696.HK.
By integrating AI and automation technologies and deep in-house drug discovery capabilities, Insilico is delivering innovative drug solutions for unmet needs including fibrosis, oncology, immunology, pain, and obesity and metabolic disorders. Additionally, Insilico extends the reach of Pharma.AI across diverse industries, such as advanced materials, agriculture, nutritional products and veterinary medicine. For more information, please visit www.insilico.com
About SK Pharmaceuticals
SK Biopharmaceuticals is a global biotech company focused on the research, development, and commercialization of innovative therapies for central nervous system (CNS) disorders and beyond. The company achieved a historic milestone as the first Korean pharmaceutical company to independently develop and commercialize a novel drug in the United States with XCOPRI® (cenobamate), an innovative treatment for epilepsy.
Through its U.S. subsidiary, SK Life Science, Inc., SK Biopharmaceuticals has established a direct commercial platform in the United States while expanding its global footprint through strategic partnerships across Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. The company continues to broaden patient access and strengthen its long-term growth potential through ongoing label and geographic expansion efforts.
Building on its commercial success, SK Biopharmaceuticals is advancing a diversified pipeline and investing in next-generation growth drivers, including radiopharmaceutical therapies (RPTs) and targeted protein degradation (TPD). Through open innovation and collaborations with leading global institutions and companies, the company continues to expand its innovation ecosystem and R&D capabilities.
SK Biopharmaceuticals is also leveraging AI and digital technologies across the drug discovery, development, and treatment continuum to enhance patient outcomes and experiences. By integrating scientific innovation with digital healthcare solutions, the company aims to build a patient-centered healthcare ecosystem and realize its vision of becoming a balanced Big Biotech.
From experience to evidence: How Shanghai schools are using AI to transform classroom analysis
Traditional classroom observation and analysis have long depended heavily on manual recording and experiential judgment, making the process time-consuming, subjective, and difficult to scale. A new case report published in the ECNU Review of Education reveals how primary and secondary schools in Shanghai are successfully overcoming these long-standing limitations by integrating the High-Quality Classroom Intelligent Analysis System into their routine instructional practices.
Authored by a research team including Chenlu Liu and Xin Zheng from East China Normal University, along with Bei Ding from Shanghai Jiangwan Middle School, the study details the practical application of this AI-based classroom analysis system. Unlike traditional methods, the platform automatically processes uploaded videos and analyzes multimodal data, including teacher–student dialogue, interaction structures, and time allocation. Within approximately 12 minutes, it translates raw classroom data into structured, visualized, and theory-informed analytic reports, making previously elusive interaction processes clearly visible.
The report presents evidence illustrating how schools use AI-generated reports to support instructional improvement across two distinct levels and four specific types. At the individual teacher level, educators use the system for "same teacher, optimized designs" to immediately compare the effectiveness of different instructional strategies for the same topic. In one instance of optimizing lesson designs, a mathematics teacher at Qibao High School taught the same topic twice in a single day. AI analysis revealed a distinct shift in classroom dynamics: The proportion of teacher-led instruction decreased from 54% in the first lesson to 34% in the second, while student self-directed activity increased from 22% to 41%. The findings demonstrate how specific design adjustments directly impact student agency.
Teachers also use the system to track professional growth over time through "same teacher, longitudinal improvement". For example, AI data collected over six years for a novice mathematics teacher showed teacher–student interaction increasing from 13% to 24%, and the proportion of open-ended questions rose from 1.92% to 11.11%. This continuous tracking provided longitudinal evidence of the teacher's effort to return more learning time to students, turning the abstract concept of student-centered teaching into an empirically grounded reality.
Beyond individual reflection, the AIC system is also transforming how teachers collaborate within China's Teaching and Research Groups (TRGs). The technology enables a more objective evaluation when teachers engage in "same lesson, different designs" to analyze how varying pedagogical approaches shape classroom structures. In a Physics TRG at Jiangwan Junior High School, two teachers taught the same "Linear Motion" lesson, and the AI report highlighted distinct but equally valuable instructional strengths. One teacher's design fostered logical reasoning with 19.3% open explanatory responses, while the other excelled in metacognitive feedback, accounting for over 21% of the evaluation phase. By making these differences visible, the system enables teachers to learn from and build on one another's instructional strengths.
This increased visibility allows groups to build consensus and integrate different strengths, ultimately driving the "collective advancement of a TRG". For instance, a Grade 5 Chinese-language TRG at Kongjiang No. 2 Primary School utilized AI reports to identify heavy teacher-led instruction. The group collaboratively introduced new strategies like role-play and mind mapping, reducing teacher talk from 69% to 55%. The group then extended these successful strategies across the entire unit and disseminated them to other grade levels, showcasing sustained, unit-level instructional optimization.
While AI provides timely and precise data that significantly deepen the understanding of student learning processes, the researchers issue a critical caution regarding its implementation in schools. The authors emphasize that the AI system should serve primarily as a collaborative partner or a supportive resource, rather than a rigid set of prescriptive indicators.
They warn that an overreliance on AI-generated metrics could inadvertently encourage "teaching to indicators," which risks weakening a teacher's independent professional judgment. As the report concludes, although artificial intelligence has the power to reshape the modes, processes, and overall efficiency of classroom analysis, the professional reflection, informed judgment, and collective wisdom of human teachers remain absolutely indispensable.
Teacher feedback is a routine part of classroom interaction, providing students with the opportunity to learn about teachers' opinions of their actions and achievements. Teacher feedback powerfully influences students'learning, achievement, and social development. However, it remains unclear whether teacher feedback in the classroom affects student social and emotional skills and, if so, what types of feedback can are most beneficial. Furthermore, if teacher feedback is positively related to student social and emotional skills, the factors that play vital roles in this relationship should be explored.
To analyze whether student perceptions of teacher feedback differ across student groups, whether teacher feedback affects students' social and emotional skills, as well as the influence mechanism of teacher feedback, a team of researchers comprising Haili Cui from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Mengmeng Zhang from Shanghai Normal University, and Xingyuan Gao from East China Normal University conducted a quantitative analysis. Their study was published online on June 1, 2026 in the ECNU Review of Education.
This study drew on data from 65,612 students in 15 cities who participated in the SSES 2023, an international survey organized by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The sample comprised younger (10-year-olds) and older (15-year-olds) cohorts. Given the hierarchical structure of the dataset, the researchers employed a three-level model to account for its nested characteristics. Hierarchical linear model analysis and a mediating effect test were performed to examine the relationships among the variables. Teacher feedback was divided into three categories, namely feedback about students' strengths, areas needing improvement, and strategies to improve their performance. Social and emotional skills were evaluated using the OECD framework, which includes five dimensions.
The researchers found that gender, age, immigrant status, and reading grades were associated with student perceptions of teacher feedback. However, the effects of immigrant status, socioeconomic status, and math grades on student perceptions of feedback differed between 10- and 15-year-olds. "Our findings suggest that variations in student perceptions of teacher feedback across different student groups. For instance, the 10-year-oldsin our study received more feedback," Cui et al.concluded.
The researchers also found positive associations between teacher feedback and the five domains of student social and emotional skills. Feedback about students' strengths, areas needing improvement, and strategies to improve their performance were each positively related to these skills.
The researchers further reported that teacher feedback affected student social and emotional skills through the teacher–student relationship, after controlling for students' background characteristics. This finding reveals that teacher feedback provides students with opportunities to understand teachers' perceptions of their personal characteristics and school performance, helping them feel respected and understood. In turn, this process improves students' favorable impressions of teachers, which contributes to more positive teacher–student relationships and support the development of students' social and emotional skills.
"Considering the significant value of this feedback in students' promoting academic performance and social and emotional skills, teachers could provide students with feedback that focuses on their personal strengths, areas for improvement, and actionable strategies for improving their academic performance," suggested Cui et al.
The insights gained from this study may provide valuable suggestions for teachers school leaders, and policymakers seeking to strengthen adolescents' social and emotional development through everyday classroom practice.
Teacher Feedback and Student Social and Emotional Skills: An Empirical Study Based on Second Round of SSES 2023 Data
Article Publication Date
21-Jun-2026
COI Statement
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Scientists have designed a clay that can prevent fruits and vegetables from rotting too quickly
The gas ethylene causes fruit and vegetables to ripen faster and is responsible for millions of tons of food being lost annually during transport and storage. Now researchers from the University of Copenhagen, among others, have succeeded in getting clay
The research was led by Bordallo’s group at the University of Copenhagen in collaboration with her group members, Karina Kovalchuk and Leander Michels at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).
Avocados from Chile, bananas from Costa Rica, tomatoes from southern Spain, mangoes from Brazil. A large part of the fruits and vegetables we eat have travelled across the globe before they reach store shelves here at home. But many millions of tons are lost every year before they reach that far.
One of the main reasons is ethylene – a natural gas that many fruits and vegetables produce and that controls their ripening. When fruits and vegetables are confined in closed packaging or containers during transport and storage, the concentration of ethylene in the air increases, accelerating the ripening process. As a result, a large part of the cargo ends up rotting before it reaches its final destination.
Clay may be the solution
Now, new research led by the University of Copenhagen shows that ordinary clay could probably be part of the solution.
"Clay is an interesting material because it is natural, cheap, non-toxic and found everywhere - and we can absorb it safely into the body. Our thought was: Can we use chemistry and physics to modify clay so that it captures the gas and thus slows down the ripening process? We have succeeded in doing so," says Associate Professor Heloisa Bordallo from the Niels Bohr Institute, who led the new study .
First, the researchers tried to capture the gas with the clay in its natural form. Here, a small amount was captured. By increasing the voids in the clay's structure with a mild chemical treatment, the researchers made room for the clay to capture more gas – but without the gas escaping again – while keeping the material nontoxic.
Researchers have never succeeded in getting clay to absorb such large amounts of ethylene, which is why they believe the concept has potential for use in food packaging.
"Now we know the fundamental physics and chemistry of the process that affects the clay's ability to absorb and retain ethylene. We didn't do that before. So now we can control and optimize the process, which is necessary for it to be used in industry," says Karina Kovalchuk, a a member of Bordallo’s group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and first author of the study.
Degasser in food packaging
According to the researchers, the research results provide a kind of design manual for how to develop sustainable materials for food packaging that tackle the problem of ethylene.
“We imagine small bags or pads of powdered clay that can be placed with fruit and vegetables during transport and absorb ethylene – in the same way as the moisture-absorbing silica bags that often come in the packaging when you buy, for example, shoes and electronics,” says Karina Kovalchuk.
The research group is currently working on optimizing the chemical process to strike the right balance between effectiveness and environmental friendliness. They are also investigating whether they can make the clay capture even more ethylene and retain it for even longer. Next, the clay material will be tested in food packaging, and hopefully then the concept can be brought to market.
Two good purposes
The new material not only has the potential to reduce food waste. Another consequence of the ethylene problem and the long transport is that fruits often do not develop their full flavour. Much fruit is harvested early precisely to avoid them rotting along the way. But many processes in the fruit are thus not fully developed and cannot be 'caught up' fully later, even if the fruit ripens with ethylene during transport. And this affects the taste and aroma.
"If we manage to solve the problem with ethylene, it serves two good purposes. First, we can reduce the global problem of food waste. At the same time, it can make it possible to harvest fruit later in the ripening process, so that consumers get fruit that tastes as it should," concludes Heloisa Bordallo.
Although the study focuses on ethylene and food, the researchers point out that the research results may also have implications for other technologies where materials need to collect certain gases.
THE STUDY SHOWS
Ethylene is a natural plant gas that many fruits and vegetables secrete and which controls their ripening.
When ethylene gas accumulates during transport and storage, it can significantly shorten the shelf life of fruits and vegetables.
In the study, the researchers used the clay mineral Montmorillonite, which is widespread, nontoxic and naturally occurring.
To investigate how the gas moves in the clay material, the researchers used advanced measurement methods with neutrons and X-rays as well as thermal analyses, where the material is heated and its reaction is measured.
The study shows that chemically modified clay can both increase the uptake and retention of ethylene.
ABOUT THE STUDY
The scientific article about the study has been published in the journal Applied Surface Science Advances.
The following researchers have contributed: Karina Kovalchuk and Leander Michels from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA; Will Gates from Deakin University, Australia; Murillo Martins from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, GW Greene from La Trobe University, Australia and Heloisa N. Bordallo from the University of Copenhagen.
The research is supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Carlsberg Foundation.
