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Email: Kyleannekiraly@asvalencia.org

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A fun way to dig into what AI integration looks like in your class, at your school with colleagues

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Psychologists can help maximize the smart adoption of these tools to enhance learning.

Cite This Article

Abrams, Z. (2025, January 1). Classrooms are adapting to the use of artificial intelligence. Monitor on Psychology, 56(1). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2025/01/trends-classrooms-artificial-intelligence

Key points

AI has been in use in classrooms for years, but a specific type of AI-generative models-could transform personalized learning and assessment.

Teenagers are quick adopters, with 7 in 10 using generative AI tools, mostly for help with homework.

Educational psychologists are studying how these tools can be used safely and effectively, including to support social and emotional learning in children and adolescents.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) promises to touch nearly every part of our lives, and education is one of the first sectors grappling with this fast-moving technology. With easy and free-to-access tools like ChatGPT, everything related to teaching, learning, and assessment is subject to change.

"In many ways, K-12 schools are at the forefront of figuring out practical, operational ways to use AI, because they have to," said Andrew Martin, PhD, a professor of educational psychology and chair of the educational psychology research group at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. "Teachers are facing a room full of people who are very much at the cutting edge of a technology."

AI has been used in classrooms for years, quietly powering learning management tools, such as Google Classroom, Canvas, and Turnitin. But the recent democratization of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, and the rush to commercialize similar technologies across sectors, is providing new challenges and opportunities for students and educators alike.

In a growing movement to find out how to safely and effectively use AI to enhance learning, educational psychologists are playing a critical role. They are studying how AI tools can lighten the workload on teachers-without interfering with the social aspects of learning-as well as how intelligent tutoring systems can personalize education while keeping students motivated. They are also exploring whether educators can leverage tools such as ChatGPT without hindering the broader goals of learning.

One question should always be at the forefront, said educational psychologist Ally Skoog-Hoffman, PhD, senior director of research and learning at the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL): "How are we using AI and technology as tools to elevate the conditions and the experiences of education for students without sacrificing the human connection that we absolutely know is integral to learning?"

How children view AI

Psychologists have studied human-technology interaction for decades. A new line of research now seeks to understand how people, including children, interact with chatbots and other virtual agents.

"Little kids learn from characters, and our tools of education already [rely on] the parasocial relationships that they form," said David Bickham, PhD, a health communication researcher based at Boston Children's Hospital, during a panel discussion on AI in the classroom. "How are kids forming a relationship with these AIs, what does that look like, and how might that impact the ability of AIs to teach?"

In a series of qualitative studies, Randi Williams, PhD, a program manager at the Algorithmic Justice League, a nonprofit focused on making AI more equitable, observed playful interactions between young children and robots, including the children's attempts to both teach the agents and learn from them. Williams and her colleagues also found that children viewed agents with a more humanlike and emotive voice as friendlier and more intelligent (Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children, 2017). But many questions remain, including how to study and foster such relationships while protecting the safety and privacy of minors-issues that psychologists are well poised to address.

Among adolescents, the use of generative AI is already widespread. Of the 7 in 10 who reported using at least one such tool in a 2024 Common Sense Media survey of 1,045 teenagers ages 13 to 18, homework help was the most common reason. About half of those who used generative AI for schoolwork did so with permission from a teacher. A similar number checked the veracity of generative AI outputs using outside sources, suggesting that many students are aware of the fallibility of such tools (The Dawn of the AI Era, Common Sense Media, 2024).

"Teens have quite a sophisticated and nuanced view of AI," said Beck Tench, PhD, an information scientist based at the Center for Digital Thriving, which explores the role of technology in young people's lives and is part of the Project Zero initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "They report that they feel conflicted, and are having just as many excitements and concerns as we do as adults," including worries about misinformation, awareness that it will change their work prospects, and enthusiasm about its potential to advance science, creativity, and humanity (Teen and Young Adult Perspectives on Generative AI, Common Sense Media, Hopelab, and Center for Digital Thriving, 2024).

The Center for Digital Thriving offers guidelines for talking to youth about generative AI, including asking children what school rules seem fair and whether they have ever heard about AI getting something wrong.

Intelligent tutoring

Much of the conversation so far about AI in education centers around how to prevent cheating-and ensure learning is actually happening-now that so many students are turning to ChatGPT for help.

A majority of teachers surveyed by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit focused on technology policy, said they have used AI detection software to check whether a student's work was their own, but those tools can also be fallible-in a way that could exacerbate inequities (Up in the Air, Center for Democracy and Technology, 2024). Black teenagers were about twice as likely as their peers to tell Common Sense that they had schoolwork incorrectly flagged as being AI-generated (The Dawn of the AI Era, Common Sense Media, 2024).

Some schools are adapting by changing the nature of assessment, Martin said. In Australia, for example, senior year science projects are traditionally submitted in written form, but students must now also present their findings orally and respond to questions in real time. On the whole, teachers told the Center for Democracy and Technology they need better guidance and training on what responsible use is and how to respond if they suspect a student is cheating by using AI tools.

On the bright side, educators are increasingly relying on AI such as Curipod, Gradescope, and Twee to automate certain tasks and lighten their workload, said Nicole Barnes, PhD, APA's senior director for schools and education. That includes generating new ideas for lesson plans and activities, writing parent-teacher letters, adapting materials for different age groups and neurodiverse learners, and getting a second opinion on how to improve existing materials.

Intelligent tutoring systems are another major focus for researchers, developers, and education technology companies. These AI-powered systems promise to help personalize the learning experience for each student, tailoring style, pace, and assessment to the individual and making lessons more accessible to students learning English or those with disabilities. Khan Academy, McGraw Hill, and Carnegie Learning are among the companies offering AI tools, while the Los Angeles Unified School District invested millions in "Ed," a custom chatbot that survived for just a few months after the financial collapse of the company that built it.

"It's sort of a gold rush right now for edtech companies to sell districts the right thing, without having any data to support their claims," said educational psychologist Stephen Aguilar, PhD, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California who studies how such technologies relate to student motivation and engagement.

As an alternative to commercial offerings, which are expensive and difficult to customize, some researchers are working on open-source intelligent tutoring systems. OATutor -built by Zachary Pardos, PhD, an associate professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues-uses generative AI to learn from an instructor's own teaching style and materials, then creates new and improved worksheets and lesson plans. This bespoke learning tool can allow teachers to replace textbook homework questions with interactive exercises that cater to each student's mastery level and do not require grading.

"The teacher can spend less time adapting to the technology, so it feels more like an extension of her class that helps unburden her, rather than another professional development task," said Pardos, who is also publishing journal articles on OATutor to add to the knowledge base about adapting and scaling generative AI in education.

A key task for psychologists, Aguilar said, will be to study how using AI tools relates to students' motivation to learn. Intelligent tutoring systems still lag far behind human teachers, Barnes said, in their ability to detect whether a student is feeling frustrated, anxious, or uncertain about the content they're learning.

"These systems often treat responses as black and white, but the reality is far more nuanced," Barnes said. "Every answer elicits an emotional response from students, whether positive or negative." Teachers detect these nuances and adjust instruction accordingly-existing AI tutors do not.

Future intelligent tutors are poised to collect more nuanced data on students as they learn-including everything from the heart rate to facial expressions, Bickham said-and know when to call on a teacher to step in. That could ultimately shift teachers into more of a facilitator role.

"The teacher role has the potential to evolve from the person who's really directing the education to a person who is kind of managing the experience," he said.

Social and relational shifts

Ask ChatGPT for homework help and you'll get a polite, friendly response, Martin said, which makes it easy to forget you're not interacting with a sentient being. The tool may therefore represent a social opportunity cost if children use it to answer questions they might otherwise ask their parents, peers, or siblings.

"The more you rely on generative AI to help you with your schoolwork, the less you might be inclined to meet up with friends in person or online after school to brainstorm around an essay," Martin said.

Teenagers also report talking to generative AI about relationships, identity, and sexuality, including to find answers to questions they're afraid to ask adults and to have the feeling of talking to a friend who won't judge them (Teen and Young Adult Perspectives on Generative AI, Common Sense Media, Hopelab, and Center for Digital Thriving, 2024).

"It's striking to me that young people are sharing their deepest, darkest secrets and questions to a company that can collect that information and use it," Tench said.

To help students learn about the downsides of using such technologies, CASEL has partnered with Common Sense Media to apply its five social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies (self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, and social awareness) to the digital space. The goal is to empower students to bring social and emotional awareness to difficult online situations. For example, how can teenagers with body image concerns navigate a social media feed rife with photos edited by AI?

CASEL is also exploring whether AI can be used to teach SEL. Because young people today are beginning to enmesh their online and offline lives, virtual SEL lessons could be useful, Skoog-Hoffman said.

Young people may develop a cyber identity that differs from their real-world social identity. How do those concepts relate to one another and influence behavior, both online and in person? Before AI can safely be used to teach SEL, more research is needed to understand these concepts, Skoog-Hoffman said, as well as whether skills such as empathy can be practiced and acquired in a digital context (with a chatbot, for example).

"For youth, online and in-person interactions are starting to become more seamless," she said. "That could change the way teens are learning about relationships and interpersonal skills, and as educators, it's time for us to adapt."

The Center for Digital Thriving suggests the following questions for starting conversations with youth about generative AI:

1. Do you know any kids your age who are using generative AI?

2. Has your school or teachers set any rules about using generative AI?

3. What kinds of uses do you think should be allowed in school?

4. Have you ever seen an AI tool get something wrong?

5. What kinds of questions feel easier to ask AI than a human?

Further reading

"My doll says it's ok": A study of children's conformity to a talking doll
Williams, R., et al. IDC '18: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children, 2018

More teachers are using AI-detection tools. Here's why that might be a problem
Prothero, A., EducationWeek, April 5, 2024

Artificial intelligence and social-emotional learning are on a collision course
Prothero, A., EducationWeek, November 13, 2023

AI in the classroom: Technology and the future of learning
Family Online Safety Institute, 2023

Using artificial intelligence tools in K-12 classrooms
Diliberti, M. K., et al. RAND Corporation, 2024

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Artificial intelligence might be able to drive cars, treat disease, and train your front door to recognize your face. But can it crack the toughest nut in literacy: Helping kids comprehend what they read?

AI is evolving to meet reading instruction and assessment needs, some experts say. For instance, some believe it won't be long before tools that use AI's natural language processing capabilities to measure skills like phonemic awareness are commonplace in schools. Intelligent tutors that can coach students to demonstrate in writing an understanding of a text they've read are already emerging.

If AI can improve reading instruction and assessment, it could fill important gaps, educators say.

Reading assessments can serve a variety of purposes: to identify which students need extra help; to diagnose students' trouble spots; and to monitor progress, which can gauge whether a particular intervention is working.

But at this point, there isn't a single digital or analog product on the market that can do all those things well, said Matthew Burns, a professor of special education at the University of Missouri and director of the University of Missouri Center for Collaborative Solutions for Kids, Practice, and Policy.

Moreover, the most important reading skill-comprehension-is also the toughest to measure and teach, Burns said. Partly that's because it must assess what students know and the strength of their vocabulary, not just whether they can sound out words.

"Our assessment of reading comprehension is very surface level," he said. "We have to figure out a better way to do it. I wouldn't be surprised if AI was part of the solution to get a really good assessment" of reading comprehension.

But he added a big caveat: "I don't think technology can replace a teacher."

Digital adaptive tools get good reviews from teachers but can't do it all

For now, digital adaptive tools-most of which don't include an AI component-are among the most widely used technologies to help teachers assess students' reading abilities.

Adaptive reading software adjusts the level of difficulty for students based on what they are mastering, advancing them to higher levels or pushing them back to more basic instruction based on how well they are performing. Adaptive assessments are also used, though plenty of teachers still continue to measure students' reading ability without digital tools.

Digital adaptive tools can save teachers a lot of time and effort, said Heather Esposito, a technology teacher coach for New Jersey's Cherry Hill district who previously worked as an English teacher and reading specialist.

In the past, she said, teachers might sit with a student while they read a few passages from a story or article, keeping track of errors, self-correction, and other factors to determine the child's fluency level. Then they might ask the student to tell them about what they read, asking different questions to gauge comprehension.

"That takes a lot of time," Esposito said. "So that's why software programs came in to try and help with that."

That's likely why Esposito and other educators generally find adaptive reading software useful, according to a survey of 1,058 educators conducted by the EdWeek Research Center from Jan. 26 through Feb. 1. Forty-four percent said they think the tech does a better job of accurately assessing a students' reading level than non-adaptive software or pen-and-paper methods, including 14 percent who said it does a "much better job."

That's compared to just 18 percent who said it does a worse job, including 4 percent who said it is "much worse." Thirty-eight percent said the effectiveness is about the same.

The current tools have clear limitations, however, Esposito pointed out. Teachers should never rely just on adaptive tools to assess student reading levels, she said.

Teachers need to closely supervise students taking adaptive assessments because they "aren't foolproof," said Catherine Snow, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education who specializes in children's literacy development.

Students can press a wrong button without realizing it, altering their score, Snow said. Or kids could get a low score on an adaptive assessment because it's making them do a boring task and they disengage. While the tools can often adapt to a kids' reading level, many are less able to adapt to a students' particular interests, Snow added.

"Kids have things they want to read about and things they don't want to read about," she said. "We sort of ignore that, with a seven-year-old and say, 'He's not reading this! He's not getting his practice in!' Well, it's some story about dolls and princesses. He doesn't really care."

What's more, students might not take the assessment particularly seriously. "We know as adults that this assessment could be consequential," Snow said. "The kid just thinks it's another stupid thing he's being asked to do."

There are structural weaknesses too. Some digital reading tools examine reading fluency in part by looking at how quickly students read, Snow said. "Those assessments, in my view, incentivize teachers to push for speed reading, rather than for deep reading, which often means you have to slow down."

Like Esposito, Snow finds digital tools particularly lacking when it comes to reading comprehension. "Comprehension is what's really hard to measure," Snow said. "There are very few tests that even hint at the deeper comprehension levels that we would really like kids as young as third or fourth grade to be able to get into."

That's not a trivial problem, she added. "Comprehension is what it's all about, right? Really, that's the reason we're teaching kids to read."

Could AI help measure students' reading comprehension and improve writing?

Some educational technology and literacy organizations are optimistic that adding AI to adaptive reading tools might offer the best opportunity yet to tackle that missing reading comprehension piece.

For instance, Quill, a nonprofit ed-tech literacy organization, has created an AI-powered tool that can read students' answers to open-ended questions about a passage or article. The tool can then coach students to use evidence from the text, as well as proper grammar, to improve their responses. That can help give students the practice they need to improve both their reading comprehension and writing skills, said the organization's founder and CEO, Peter Gault.

Building reading comprehension through writing is a contrast from the typical approach, Gault said. "Almost every reading tool today uses multiple-choice questions as the main mechanism for then demonstrating your knowledge of the text. Our perspective on multiple choice is that it is a shallower way of learning."

Khan Academy, a nonprofit digital learning company with more than 145 million registered users, is also considering using AI to help with students' reading comprehension and writing.

"In the next year, there's going to be ways that you can actually do reading comprehension and writing at the same time, where there's a passage, and then the AI essentially works with the student to construct essentially a five-paragraph essay, arguing a point anchored in that essay," said the organization's founder, Sal Khan, in an interview. "So, it's both reading comprehension and writing at the same time. Stuff like this never happened before."

For her part, Esposito has already been experimenting with the latest version of ChatGPT, the AI-powered writing tool that emerged late last year. She's asked it, for instance, to explain the hero cycle-a common language arts concept-to a 10-year-old who loves video games, or a 15-year-old who reads manga, a popular genre of Japanese graphic novels. The tool produced responses that were much better than she had expected.

"You could take a topic or a concept and ask it to level it" to match the students' reading level and "to make it more meaningful" given a kid's personal interests, Esposito said. And she expects the tools will only improve with time.

"AI is a hard trend," Esposito said, meaning it's here for the long term. ChatGPT is just an early iteration, she said, likening it to the search engines of the late 1990s.

But even powerful AI technology still needs substantial teacher input, she said. "It's about striking a really good balance of seeing the potential that's out there with AI, finding the tools that work best for you and your students and knowing that you can pivot at any point," Esposito said.

Snow seconded that sentiment, and cautioned teachers to rely on their own judgement even as increasingly complex AI reading tools emerge.

"Teachers should always know that their instincts might be better" than the people who designed the software or the school leaders who purchased it, Snow said. "If they think something is not really working very well, it might be because it's not really working very well, and they should be cautious about imposing it on students."

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Holding Students Accountable in the Age of AI

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Holding Students Accountable in the Age of AI

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251: Holding Students Accountable in the Age of AI

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Embracing Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom

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Embracing Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom

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Although there is a huge amount of interest in generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the consumer world, particularly since the release of OpenAI's free ChatGPT program last November, in the hallowed halls of academia the response has been more wary. Concerns abound about academic integrity. There are also worries about how AI-generated content can be biased, inaccurate, and sometimes contain entirely false information, dubbed "hallucinations."

The cautious response is to be expected according to Houman Harouni, lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a former elementary and high school teacher. He has compassion for educators trying to grapple with a rapidly shifting world shaped by machine learning.

"Technology creates a shock," he explains. "This shock is sometimes of a magnitude that we cannot even understand it, in the same way that we still haven't absorbed the sharp shock of the mobile phone."

Harouni has long wrestled with the impact of cutting-edge technology on education, including experimenting in his own classroom, and is convinced that when it comes to teaching "the medium is part of the message." He believes that getting school students and those in higher ed to engage with virtual worlds is essential.

"Where we want to get to is a place where you're dancing with it, dancing with robots," he says.

If the idea of waltzing with a robot creates apprehension for educators, Harouni has some advice :
1) Stop pretending that it doesn't exist
Educators must "help the next generation face the reality of the world and develop instruments and ways of navigating this reality with integrity," Harouni says. Students are well aware that technologies such as ChatGPT exist and are already experimenting with them on their own, but they need guidance about how to use them responsibly.

Teacher education and professional development programs should not ignore generative artificial intelligence either.
2) Use AI alongside your students
Engage with generative AI tools with your students in person, when possible. Otherwise, share AI-generated responses to questions during class time and ask students to consider them or have students experiment with the technology at home, document their experiences, and share them with the class.
3) Teach students how to ask the ChatGPT tool questions
"The educator's job is to understand what opportunities are left open beside the technology," Harouni says.

Teach students to do what artificial intelligence cannot do. For example, unlike robots, we can ask ourselves questions and that is what students need to be trained in: to know how to ask questions and to learn how to critique their own questions, frameworks, and the answers generated by AI, he says.

Students can start with topics and questions that they are interested in and ask ChatGPT for answers, he suggests. The knack is then getting them excited about asking follow-up questions. Harouni uses a personal experience with his 10-year-old stepdaughter and his newborn baby to illustrate his point. When his stepdaughter asked him why he kept telling her to be careful with the baby, Harouni turned to ChatGPT to help her to get to the bottom of her question.

"My creativity as the teacher or the parent at that moment is to say, 'What is it that you're really trying to ask? What is it that you really want to know?'"

While ChatGPT churned out a "whole bunch of answers about the fragility of the baby," with some patience, Harouni helped his stepdaughter discover the question that she truly wanted to ask which was what she could safely do with the new baby. "At the moment that the exploration [with AI] ends with the answer, you know that your work as a teacher begins," he explains.
4) Use generative AI tools to spark the imagination
One frequent concern about generative artificial intelligence is that students will use it to cheat and avoid the hard work of thinking for themselves, but Harouni says that tools like ChatGPT should really challenge teachers and professors to reassess the assignments they give their students.

"You have to stop thinking that you can teach exactly the way you used to teach when the basic medium has changed," he explains. If students can turn to ChatGPT or other AI language models for quick and easy answers then there is a problem with the lesson, Harouni believes.

"We have to create assignments that push [students] to the point where they have to question what is the framework that is being used here and what would it mean for me to radically change this framework," he says.

Harouni recently wrote about how he used ChatGPT to spur higher-level thinking among his students at HGSE when he presented them with a challenging case study that had no easy solutions. The students' initial responses were no better than the chatbot's ideas. Instead "it was after ChatGPT reflected to the students their failure of imagination that they could begin to think of options that they, or any automatic language scrawler, would not have readily reached for," he explained in a co-authored article for Wired.

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Embracing Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom

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Generative AI tools can reflect our failure of imagination and that is when the real learning starts