AI in Education: Rationale, Principles, and Instructional Implications

AI-powered Educational Platforms and Tools

Context: All grades and subjects, including mathematics, humanities, coding, and social sciences.

Implementation: Teachers and students use various AI tools and platforms. Teachers use dashboards to monitor student progress, access support for writing tasks, and complement classroom experiences. Students use AI for various tasks, including choosing topics, finding material, generating text, and combining verbal and visual messages to enhance learning. These tools often provide hints instead of answers or guide students to find the answer themselves.

Outcomes: Increased productivity, improved teaching and assessments, ability to produce text, access to information, easier to understand subject matter, strengthen learning, and anecdotal reports suggest teachers find these platforms meaningful.

Challenges: Limited empirical evidence on the impact on student learning progress, potential to undermine deep learning and critical thinking if used as a shortcut, production of inaccurate or even fabricated information (hallucinations), and the benefit will depend on the student's interaction with the tool.

AI Tutor (hint-based)

Context: Mathematics

Implementation: A chatbot providing hints instead of answers to guide students to find the answer themselves.

Outcomes: Beneficial for learning, gives the student something to ponder instead of simply providing the answer.

Challenges: Whether this conclusion is valid across other contexts is as yet unknown.

Pedagogical

Potential to undermine deep learning and critical thinking when students use AI as a shortcut; students may copy answers directly without engaging cognitively.

Proposed Solutions: Deliberate educational strategies to ensure that AI supplements rather than replaces genuine cognitive effort; teachers should develop strategies and assessments to ensure students develop the necessary knowledge and understanding; teachers can emphasize how AI can be used as a tool for learning that supplements rather than replaces their own efforts. Schools help students avoid harming their own learning processes when using AI to take shortcuts; emphasize how AI can be used as a tool for learning that supplements rather than replaces their own efforts.

Accuracy and Reliability

AI tools, such as ChatGPT, can produce inaccurate or fabricated results (hallucinations).

Proposed Solutions: Students should be critical and able to evaluate information using their own knowledge; teachers and librarians should still play a role in advising students on where to find good sources that provide in-depth explanations; Teachers should raise topics such as the ethical use of AI, including discussions about academic integrity, and the limitations of AI.

Cognitive Overload/Distraction

Digital distractions can easily hinder students' concentration and thus learning opportunities.

Proposed Solutions: Teachers’ learning management; clear rules for how AI tools can and cannot be used.

Bias and Inequality

Inappropriate use of AI can have both a gender-specific and social bias.

Proposed Solutions: Schools help students avoid harming their own learning processes when using AI to take shortcuts; emphasize how AI can be used as a tool for learning that supplements rather than replaces their own efforts.

Lack of Evidence

Limited empirical evidence on the effects of AI in classrooms.

Proposed Solutions: More research to better understand the desirable functions that AI can have in the learning process; teachers must rely on their professional judgment.

Student Motivation and Self-Discipline

Students may lack self-discipline and use AI tools to avoid effort, leading to superficial learning.

Proposed Solutions: Teachers can motivate students to reflect on the material on their own before seeking information elsewhere; teachers can use AI tools to tailor assignments to be more specific, personal or context-dependent.

Teacher's Role

It is difficult to say that there is solid research-based evidence that AI tools are beneficial for learning progress.

Proposed Solutions: Teachers’ learning leadership could be of great importance; teachers should shift students' focus from grade awareness to the learning process itself, etc.

Project Contact: Dr. Jianhua Yang

LLM Model Version: gemini-2.0-flash-lite