The majority of educators expect use of artificial intelligence tools will increase in their school or district over the next year, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey.
Overall, more than half of school and district leaders and teachers surveyed—56 percent—said they anticipate AI use to rise. Most respondents who predicted an increase expected to employ the technology “a little” more, and 6 percent of respondents said they foresee using it “a lot” more.
Another 43 percent expected their schools’ level of use to remain the same. And a tiny slice of respondents—1 percent—actually anticipate a decrease.
The EdWeek Research Center’s nationally representative survey of 924 educators, including teachers and school and district leaders, was conducted online from Nov. 30 to Dec. 6 of last year.
The recognition that generative AI is likely to play an increasingly significant role in the economy helped some districts move beyond the question of whether to ban ChatGPT and other large language models and instead focus on helping teachers and students use them effectively, said Bree Dusseault, a principal at and the managing director for the Center for Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University. Dusseault has studied AI policymaking.
Districts that previously considered barring the technology are saying, “‘oh gosh, you know, actually, we are probably going to all be using some [large language models] or something like ChatGPT in the future, so students may need to actually have skill building on how to use it appropriately,” she said.
Some districts are already looking for ways the technology might help save educators’ time.
The Santa Ana Unified School District in California helped principals see how ChatGPT and generative tools can “respond to email or write a graduation speech,” said Jerry Almendarez, the district’s superintendent. “The more our principals started to engage with it, the more they were like, ‘oh wow, can I use it to write my school site plan?’”
