Dive Brief:

• Student use of artificial intelligence chatbots to improve their writing and studying skills has benefits and pitfalls, and the education field still has work to do in triaging between them, according to university researchers.
• Among the upsides are that 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 of them, said Sarah Levine, associate director of Stanford University's Center to Support Excellence in Teaching. 
• On the other hand, Levine said, 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.” This dilemma requires teachers and school leaders to rethink writing assignments to make them less template-heavy, with “instructions for paragraphs one, two and three.” Levine said. 

Dive Insight:

And while districts and schools understandably feel pressure to start implementing AI as it’s being rolled out in the wider world, they should take their time, Levine said. “We’re hurrying a little bit.”

“It’s an opportunity for teachers, administrators and, especially, standardized test developers to think about other things students can do with language besides write very automated essays,” Levine said.

A 2024 report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University found that while only 18% of K-12 teachers nationally were using AI in the classroom, these early adopters mostly taught English/language arts and social studies at the middle and high school levels. Around half of them were using generative AI chatbots, while 60% of districts either had provided or intended to provide teacher training on AI by the end of the 2023-24 school year.

Overall, educators are “taking a pretty ad-hoc approach to AI,” with a wide variety of adoption strategies and student experiences with AI tools, said Bree Dusseault, principal and managing director at CRPE. 

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 said. Also, the tools vary widely — from a generic model like ChatGPT to more customized education technology products — and they’re advancing rapidly.

Among the pitfalls, Dusseault said, are 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. She’s also concerned about higher levels of access for students in wealthier suburban districts 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 said. 

“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 added. 

Ultimately, district leaders need to be transparent with teachers and students about what AI can and can’t do well, Levine said. 

“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 said. 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.”