According to an Education Week article, many math teachers are not receiving the professional development needed to integrate artificial intelligence into their classrooms and reap AI benefits such as these:
- A student tackles a math problem referencing his favorite superhero, which an AI program has produced to personalize the problem to his interests and skills.
- AI analyzes a math teacher’s instruction to show how often she prompted students to show their reasoning when solving a problem.
- As a group of students team up to solve an equation, an AI-powered tool identifies and encourages each collaborative interaction among the group.
A 2025 survey by the EdWeek Research Center finds that many math teachers are not prepared or confident enough to tap into AI’s rapid advances in classrooms.
Many questions surround AI use in math classes: How do teachers keep pace with rapidly changing technologies? What are age-appropriate methods to incorporate AI into learning? Since free AI tools can solve complicated math problems, what kind of math do students even need to learn when? Bottom line: how will AI change math instruction?
AI holds great promise for improving math instruction, say experts, but teaching foundational math skills remains priority number one in schools across the country.
“We know that children learn math from being able to problem-solve, being able to use reasoning skills, critical thinking, having opportunities to collaborate with each other and talk about what they’re doing,” says Latrenda Knighten, the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and a former math teacher. “AI will not change any of those things.”
Jennifer Cook, a 4th grade science and math teacher at First Avenue School in Newark, N.J., relies on Khan Academy’s Khanmigo’s AI features for small group instruction. She receives recommendations for grouping students based on AI data analysis of their strengths and weaknesses. What once was a three-hour task per week now takes three minutes.
AI also allows Cook to work with one group of students while the others get instructional help.
“(AI) just gives them another tool to use to be a little bit more independent with doing some of their assignments and tasks,” she says. “I don’t have to keep stopping to answer all their questions. I can just focus on those six kids that I’m working with.”
AI has applications beyond teaching math, says Jennifer Jacobs, an associate research professor in cognitive science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. AI-powered technologies can promote student engagement within a math classroom and teacher reflection outside of it.
Jacobs is part of a team developing an AI tool that gives math teachers AI-based feedback on their teaching. AI records a math teacher’s classroom lesson—analyzing and logging instances when the teacher used quality instructional practices, such as prompting students to provide their reasoning in their solving of a math problem. All data points are displayed on a dashboard so teachers can explore, correct, and inform their instruction — on their own or with a coach, Jacobs says.
Still, many math teachers are skeptical about the benefits of incorporating AI into math instruction, according to a recent EdWeek Research Center survey. Thirty-five percent do not believe AI instructional tools will impact achievement in their school in the next 5 years, and 20 percent see AI tools causing math achievement to decline.
This skepticism may be caused by current AI chatbots often getting things wrong, says Sierra Noakes, the director of ed-tech evaluation for Digital Promise, a nonprofit that works on helping schools improve their use of technology.
Skepticism could be also stoked by a lack of confidence in using AI technology. Nearly 70 percent of math teachers say they have not received professional development on how to leverage artificial intelligence to teach math. Of those, 66 percent say in the survey they would like training.
Most math teachers surveyed report their school or district permits them to use AI to teach, but half say their principal or supervisor has not encouraged them at all to experiment with existing AI tools.
That lack of support may lead to a lack of confidence in the ability to integrate AI into teaching. Four out of 10 math teachers in the survey rate their skills at this as “nonexistent.” Only about 1 in 10 rate their ability as good or excellent.
Professional development and administrative support will need to step up if the predictions of many math teachers come true. More than half of the teachers surveyed (55 percent) predict artificial intelligence will be integrated into middle and high school curricula in the next five years, according to the EdWeek Research Center survey, and 41 percent predict AI will be integrated at all grade levels.
Experts say future AI-assisted math instruction should include AI literacy for students. Teachers — in all subjects — play important roles in modeling good AI use and showing students that AI is not an infallible, all-knowing technology. AI outputs are often flawed or flat-out wrong, experts say.
This puts a premium on foundational math skills. “Having that logical capacity, problem-solving capability, actually math is one of the best ways to build this,” says Po-Shen Loh, a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “If you go and do hard math problems that twist your brain into a knot, that actually gives you a way to learn how to explore lots and lots of chains of possibility.”
Being able to solve a problem that students have never seen before is the most durable skill to develop, Loh says. Teachers should focus on solving the kinds of problems found in middle school math competitions, which require students to understand fractions, calculate percentages, and analyze some geometry, he says.
Success in math goes beyond creative problem-solving abilities to include teamwork, communication, and cooperation – all useful skills in an AI-powered world, he says.
“This human-to-human communication is the differentiator between you and some robot,” Loh says.
Education Week
