What do 4000 high school students have to say about AI in education?
We’ve held space for our education practitioners to share their perspectives on AI in education.
Recently, Lily and Aditya from the student-led movement AIxEducation urged AI education spaces to include a seat at the table for our young people.
Students should be co-creating their new educational experience alongside the adults.
In today’s episode, I attempt to push further in this direction by elevating 4000 high school student voices who have opinions on AI in education.
The ACT recently published the largest study I’ve seen on student perceptions and mindsets of artificial intelligence to date. The study explores quite a few different topics including how many students use AI, what types of AI, their perspectives on career and writing, and school conditions with AI.
I talk with Jeff Schiel, Becky Bobek, and Joyce Zhou-Yile Schnieders from the ACT Research team.
Here are my five takeaways from our conversation:
High School Students are using AI tools like ChatGPT
At the time of this assessment, which was in June, they were hovering around 46%. I imagine this rate has significantly increased as do Jeff, Becky, and Joyce. This also stood out to me because it suggests a high volume of high school students were already using these tools, even in early stages, so their proficiency and perspectives here are likely far more nuanced & thoughtful than they get credit for given the mainstream arguments around academic integrity.
The biggest reason why high school students were not using AI tools was because ‘they weren’t interested.’
I found this reason fascinating and we speculated in the conversation as to why students may not be interested in AI. A couple reasons we explored were the varying academic levels of students correlated with AI engagement, seeing AI as primarily a tool for entertainment, and lack of access to AI tools in school.
Students don’t believe they need to change their career aspirations because of AI
I had mixed emotions around this finding — one the one hand, I want our young people to drive full force at the passions and interests they’ve identified for themselves regardless of macro level evolutions to industries. On the other hand, I’ve highlighted in numerous episodes (most recently why specialization may be setting us up for failure) how the workforce is experimenting and adopting AI at a seismic rate. This reiterates the need for spaces to explore AI and develop AI literacy in classroom so students have some context on our current technological revolution while contextualizing their future.
Students aren’t overwhelmingly looking to use AI to ‘cheat’ on written assignments as mainstream narratives suggest
90% of surveyed students reported not being interested in using AI to write their college admissions essays. Of the 10% of students who showed an interest in using AI to construct their essay, they most saw it supporting with grammar and sentence composition.
When asked about authentic writing, one student responded: “Because the essay is supposed to be authentically me, authentically human- and authentic can’t come from auto generation or other such methods. Real people can tell when what’s in front of them isn’t truly real.”
My biggest takeaway:
Our young people are thoughtful, can see the nuance in AI technology, and are hungry to make a difference. As your team, school, district, or institution is developing AI policies, make sure students have a seat at the table.
A huge thank you to Jeff, Becky, and Joyce for the space to elevate the voices of the students in this survey.
For the full study breakdown, check out our full episodehere. You can also check out their published paper here. Join the conversation here.
I’m thrilled to announce I will be presenting at Sequoia Con 2024!! If your team, school, district, or institution is ready to take the leap in exploring AI implementation, my session will support with strategies for implementation and navigating change management!
The team at Evergreen is also giving any of my followers $50 off conference registration if you use my code: AICONVO.
You can register here. Early bird registration ends on Thursday February 1st. Hope to see you at my session!
#HumansAtTheHeartOfEducation
