A 2024 report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at Arizona State University found only 18% of K-12 teachers nationally using artificial intelligence in the classroom, with early adopters mostly teaching English/language arts and social studies at the middle and high school levels, according to an article K-12 Dive.
Educators are “taking a pretty ad-hoc approach to AI,” with a wide variety of adoption strategies and student experiences with AI tools, says Bree Dusseault, principal and managing director at CRPE.
Around half of those using AI were using generative AI chatbots.
The education field must work through the pros and cons of students using chatbots to improve writing and studying skills, according to university researchers.
Among the upsides: chatbots can act as coaches or mentors when humans aren’t available, offering generic but reasonably good, “relatively creative” feedback to middle- and high-school students who bounce ideas off them, says Sarah Levine, associate director of Stanford University’s Center to Support Excellence in Teaching.
One downside: students sometimes “hand over the thinking work” of writing to bots, which create the end product quickly, and “they can do B-plus work all the time,” Levine says. This cognitive off-loading requires teachers and school leaders to rethink writing assignments to make them less template-heavy, with “instructions for paragraphs one, two and three.” Levine says.
Teachers and schools are sensibly concerned about plagiarism, and they’re “in a bit of a dilemma while they learn what to do, and how to put the tools to the best use possible,” she says. Tools vary widely — from a generic model like ChatGPT to more customized education technology products — and they are advancing rapidly.
Another potential pitfall is that students might get unclear instruction from teachers and misuse AI, in some cases because they’re learning AI faster or more deeply than their teachers, Dusseault says. She’s also concerned that students in wealthier suburban districts have greater access to build their skills and capacity.
“There is a risk that marginalized students, who are not served well, will not get the training or experience with AI to both master learning and compete in the workforce,” she says.
“The other reality is that students are going to be graduating into a workforce that expects them to use AI and expects them to use it for things like writing,” she says.
District leaders need to be open and honest with teachers and students about what AI can and can’t do well, Levine says.
“That requires administrators not to push teachers into using AI right away, and to be transparent about the possible benefits of AI but also the real concerns, to acknowledge those,” she says. Teachers shouldn’t think, “Never use AI for X, Y and Z,” but rather, “Let’s see what it looks like. … Let’s see what we lose and what we gain.”
K-12 Dive
