Wellbeing Futures: Innovation, Policy and Research

Vol. 2 (2026)
Articles

Supporting Student Wellbeing Through AI-Enabled Authentic Oral Assessment: Evidence from a Pilot Study in Legal Education

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  • Fiona Hum,
  • Craig Horton
Fiona Hum
Advance Fellow of HEA, Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia
Craig Horton
Education, Design & Multimedia, Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia

Published 2026-06-18

Keywords

  • Wellbeing,
  • Anxiety,
  • Metacognition,
  • Critical thinking,
  • Student learning,
  • Professional practice
    • ...More
    Less
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Supporting Student Wellbeing Through AI-Enabled Authentic Oral Assessment: Evidence from a Pilot Study in Legal Education . (2026). Wellbeing Futures: Innovation, Policy and Research, 2, 11-21. https://doi.org/10.65638/2978-882X.2026.02.02

Abstract

Central to alleviating anxiety and stress for oral assessments, Authentic Teaching and Learning Through Adaptive Simulations (ATLAS) provides a simulation environment where students can engage in realistic scenarios to enhance situational experiences, improve learning and understand people-people interactions. It has been primarily used in medicine, pharmacy and mediation contexts. The authors piloted ATLAS in the Juris Doctor Law Program, Monash University for a small cohort of postgraduate Law students enrolled in an Evidence Law unit. Data collection involved recording student interactions with an AI-generated judicial avatar ("Judge Jones") across up to five 10-minute asynchronous practice sessions, followed by a post-assessment user experience survey. While the main limitation of the pilot study was the small sample size the quantitative findings were highly encouraging and indicate a positive impact on student learning and emotional regulation whereby 95% of surveyed students agreed or strongly agreed that they felt better prepared for their final oral assessments and two thirds felt less anxious after using the AI platform.

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