AI as a Simulated Client: Impact on Educational Psychology Students’ Therapeutic Skills

Role-playing emerges as a central pedagogical strategy, enabling trainees to navigate complex scenarios through human-like interactions that bridge theoretical knowledge with practical expertise. As generative artificial intelligence continues its exponential growth, its promise in mental health contexts has garnered substantial attention. However, the integration of chatbots into educational psychology training remains an underexplored frontier. This study aims to address this gap by examining the impacts of an intervention using role-play simulations of psychoeducational counseling sessions on therapeutic skills. This pre-posttest controlled study engaged 112 educational counseling students. A treatment group (n = 53) participated in an eight-week intervention using a Gemini-powered simulation, which featured a pre-prompted student-profile chatbot and an artificial third party providing post-activity feedback on participants’ performance as counselors, while a comparison group (n = 59) had no access to the simulation. Therapeutic skill assessments were conducted before and after the experiment, complemented by qualitative interviews exploring students’ perceptions. The chatbot-mediated intervention yielded gains in feedback synthesis, guided discovery, cognitive-behavioral focus, and change strategies. While some respondents expressed skepticism, overall sentiment was positive. This research highlights the potential of chatbot-augmented training to enhance empathetic understanding, interrogative precision, and reflective feedback capabilities in educational psychology curricula.