ORANGE COUNTY, CALIF. — A recent nationally representative survey of 545 K-12 educators found that many believe artificial intelligence (AI) is redefining education. The survey indicated that educators have concerns regarding AI's impact on student trust, critical thinking, and academic integrity, though it also revealed that using AI in their own work provides time-saving benefits.
Nearly three-quarters of the polled educators believe AI will have greater implications for education than the internet or computers previously did. "We're in an environment where teachers feel like this is going to fundamentally reshape the future of education moving forward." Mallory Newall, a senior vice president, said. "They have serious concerns about AI's impact on how they relate to their students and how students relate to each other." Approximately 80% of those surveyed believe schools should teach responsible AI use.
While a little more than half of polled teachers stated AI is not used by students in their classes, about two-fifths reported that students use AI in class at least once per week. Over 54% of polled teachers said AI makes it more difficult for students to develop critical thinking skills. Christa Corricelli, a special education teacher at Saugus Middle/High School, said, "I think students who aren't already intrinsically self-motivated to be critical thinkers, like that top 1% of the class, I think people who are not already that personality type, we're going to see those critical thinking skills atrophy over time." Additionally, 55% of teachers surveyed believe students primarily use AI as a shortcut to avoid work.
Sixty percent of polled teachers have used AI to help with work tasks. A majority of those teachers reported that AI saves them time, with 63% indicating the time savings amount to two hours or less per week. Michele Naber, a biology teacher at El Toro High School, allows students to use AI in certain lessons to practice prompting chatbots and verifying information. "That's one of the things that has to be taught: You can't take it literally." Naber said. "That's something that normally, as a teacher, would have taken you probably upwards of an hour and minimized the entire task to five minutes." Naber said.
Nearly 60% of surveyed educators reported that AI is reducing trust between students and teachers. "The erosion of trust caused by AI is one of the biggest red flags in the data." Newall said. Approximately 40% of surveyed educators are requiring more handwritten assignments, and a similar percentage are requiring more in-class assignments due to AI. Naber discontinued an extra credit program that required photos of beach cleanups because AI can generate fake images of such events. She also modified her curriculum to require all lab work to be completed in class and reduced the grading weight of homework. Corricelli said, "Teachers are much more suspect of things that students do outside the classroom and I hear a lot of comments like, 'Well, we can't do it this way because they're just going to use AI.'"