It’s hard to predict the future, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence. But in a recent survey, the EdWeek Research Center asked math teachers to look ahead five years and imagine the ways AI tools might reshape math instruction and student learning.
Overall, they’re skeptical that AI will improve teaching and learning in their subject but confident that knowing how to use AI to solve math problems is a skill students will need in their future careers.
The vast majority of math teachers surveyed think that AI will be integrated into math curricula at least to some extent within the next five years.
But many math teachers are not convinced that these developments will yield results. A little more than half of math teachers surveyed predict that over the next five years that AI-powered instructional tools will either cause math achievement in their schools to decline or remain flat.
The EdWeek Research Center surveyed 411 elementary, middle, and high school teachers online in February.
Part of what might be driving math teachers’ skepticism is the concern that students will use the technology to cheat. Two-thirds of teachers surveyed said that AI-powered tools to teach math will lead to increased incidents of cheating in their schools.
Another reason why teachers might doubt the efficacy of AI for math instruction is that AI doesn’t reliably solve math problems correctly.
“AI has been really low-quality in math, so when it generates outputs in math, there are very frequently inaccuracies,” said Sierra Noakes, the director of ed-tech evaluation for Digital Promise, a nonprofit that works on helping schools improve their use of technology. Noakes recently spoke with Education Week for a special series on AI in math instruction.
On top of that concern is the fact that AI tools that claim to personalize math problems based on students’ interests are not always sophisticated enough to produce engaging or meaningful math problems for students, Noakes said. A student may be interested in birds, but that doesn’t mean that a math problem that has a student adding together a certain number of seagulls and crows is automatically engaging to them, she said.
“The best examples I have seen with math teachers using [AI] is actually supporting students through the critical thinking of, ‘This answer is wrong. Where do you think the AI went wrong in getting to this point?’ and actually using it as a model of how to dig into the math problem they were working on.”
Despite math teachers’ reservations about AI, there was broad consensus in the survey that solving math problems with AI is a skill students will need in the job market. Three-quarters of math teachers agreed with that assessment.
Data analysis for this article was provided by the EdWeek Research Center. Learn more about the center’s work.
