How’s AI Getting Along with Teachers: Compare U.S. and Chinese Teachers’ Use of Artificial Intelligence

• In Event: Teacher Identities, kindness curriculum and systemic reform

Proposal

The introduction of Artificial Intelligence has transformed people's lives and brought opportunities and challenges to various industries (Posner & Fei Fei, 2020). As a traditional but essential industry, the education sector has been trying to understand and incorporate this advanced technology to seek changes and innovations to enhance the effectiveness of education (Luckin et al., 2019). How to rub elbows with AI becomes a new challenge that all AI developers, policymakers, and educators are working on integrating valuable, well-designed, and ethical AI into front-line educational environments (Zhai et al., 2021).
Teachers, as the main protagonists in educational settings, have also became the focus of many AI developers, as well as AI education researchers. Much literature already emphasizes the importance of teacher-focused AI in the overall field of AI for education (AIED) (Holmes & Tuomi, 2022; Luckin et al.,2022). Besides, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology (OET) advised developers to work with and trust educators in the ecosystem to innovate AI products (OET, 2024).
Thus, how well teachers and AI rub off in real-world education and what developers and educators can learn from this became two interesting questions.
As two central education and technology nations, the U.S. and China have developed policies to guide and discipline teachers in using AI (OET 2023; MOE 2024). In this study, a total of eight teachers from China and the United States were selected for pilot interviews. Four of the American teachers were from four different schools in the East, West, South, and Central regions of the U.S. The four Chinese teachers also came from four different schools in the geographical regions of China, including east, west, south, and north. Interviews were conducted through WeChat calls and Zoom. Based on Holmes's (2023) questionnaire paradigm and combining the interview results, a questionnaire was designed and collected further from Chinese and American teachers to understand teachers' use and perceptions of AIED products.
According to the result, U.S. and Chinese schools have different training measures for teachers to use AI. Both U.S. and Chinese teachers have been exposed to AI, but have different teaching applications and preferences for using AI products. In addition, most Chinese and U.S. teachers believe that AI can be positively helpful in education. However, both of them pointed out some technical improvements that AI products can make to increase educators’ user experience. Teachers also showed their perceptions of how AI can help students and some concern.
This study responded to the call of the policy of both the U.S. and China. By investigating the use of AI by educators in the real world, this research could provide some reference for future related research and AI educational product developers. Moreover, this study may also furnish some ideas for districts and schools to create a more mature AI education ecosystem.

Author

• Lujie Ma, Peabody College (Vanderbilt University)