Effects of Educating Teachers and Students on Proper AI Usage

Artificial Intelligence (AI), has become a staple in students’ education. Reports indicate that most students in the United States utilize AI to help with schoolwork. As a result, it is imperative that educators understand how to best regulate students’ usage of AI to ensure students are properly developing their academic abilities. This paper demonstrates through a preliminary survey that AI usage is rampant in schools, even if that school has an AI policy. Moreover, surveys demonstrate that most students do not understand how they are expected to utilize AI, mainly because the teachers themselves do not understand AI. So, through an experiment and a survey, this paper proves that when teachers are properly trained how to guide students in using AI on assignments, students both perceive AI as beneficial, and actually use it to develop their critical thinking skills. Without this teaching or guidance, however, students both perceive and use AI as an easy way out of doing work. Even if a school or district has an AI policy, the results of this study show that proper teacher professional development and student guidance is necessary to properly develop students' critical thinking skills in the classroom.