What do children think about AI in the classroom?

Opportunity, or threat? #002

A couple of weeks ago, I shared some research I had been working on for a while. The audience was small but the message was clear - they were interested in the findings.

AI has become a conversation starter. People ask ‘what are your timelines?’ What they really mean is when do you think jobs will get automated, or will teachers get replaced? Everyone has an opinion it seems. Against a lively backdrop of commotion, AI is rupturing the fabric of societal norms - and pointing us in a new direction.

I was curious to see what our young people thought about AI. The youth are often overlooked, their voices unheard. By contrast, they are always told they will inherit the future and need to become better problem-solvers, pragmatists. This is a heavy burden to carry, and unfair. So, I went about interviewing these custodians of the imagined future to find out what they really thought, and here it is . . .

Research context

I am about to embark on my final thesis ahead of a VIVA so wanted to test the waters that surround AI. This was to be a small scale research-project, designed to illuminate some patterns and trends worth exploring when it came to the 50k words stage.

I teach secondary education in the UK, so the children are aged 11-18 years of age. For this study, I selected two focus groups - aged 14. Each focus group had 8 children in, mixed genders and backgrounds. Some had an interest in AI, others not so much. I wanted this to be a true representation of the youth today.

Methodology

I decided I would conduct interviews, adopting a semi-structured format to give some freedom to explores ideas and themes as they appeared. After gaining consent from the GateKeeper (my Headteacher), and the parents, I set up weekly sessions with the aim of capturing the students views around AI.

Interviews orbited around three main themes; the good, the bad and the possible. We explored hopes and fears related to AI with a keen eye on its impact in the classroom.

Interviews were recorded, transcribed (with the help of an AI) then I used Thematic Analysis to extract codes. If you are new to Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke 2006), it is a way of emphasising, identifying, analysing and interpreting patterns of meaning within qualitative data. Essentially, the data talks to you and tells you a story, but you have to extract it. It can be a painful and lonely endeavour - and very time consuming. But it is worth the effort if you care about the outcome.

Findings

I’ll start with the headlines, then unpick them a little with some rationale and explanations.

At the end of process, three main themes emerged:

1. Children refer to AI as ‘them’ and ‘they’ constantly during the interviews

2. Teachers are here to stay, no robot replacements please

3. Children feel that humans need to focus more on the unique traits and dispositions that make us human

Review of Literature

I appreciate the order is out here, but I thought you might appreciate the headlines first. We can work backwards from there.

I have read extensively around AI, from early Kurzweil to Harraway’s posthuman musings - it is a thick field. The more you look, the more there is to read. AI is a contested terrain with many authors claiming it to be one thing or the next. The more I read, the more I realised there is a common set of controversies that surround AI, at least in the academic sense. These deserve a fair hearing as they influence and divide popular opinion.

The term controversy is an interesting term to think with. Coined from the Latin controversia, it literally means ‘turned in an opposite direction’. AI and the noise that surrounds it has a habit of challenging opinions, and in some cases - changing them.

On first inspection, four controversies jumped out from the research-informed practice around AI. A meta-analysis by Perrotta & Selwyn (2020) was a useful find.

As I dug a little deeper into a fertile body of research, new controversies emerged that were worthy of exploration.

These controversies were proving divisive like all good controversies do, leaving people either side of this dividing line. If there is interest in the controversies above - I will devote a post to it in the future. Please comment below.

Unpacking the findings

I found this part fascinating. During the coding phase of Thematic Analysis, themes started to emerge. There are six steps in the process. I will share them below for transparency.

At the coding phase there were 108 codes emerging. The theming phase narrowed this down to eleven clear themes. There was convergence between these themes which resulted in the final three. I used a technique called concept mapping to tie together ideas and link similarities.

There were a number of outliers which on first inspection looked worthy of inclusion in the final three. However, they did not surface as the main themes and it would be unethical to make them surface. So, here they are:

• Students saw AI as an ally, something to keep them company. Many spoke about the role technology played in keeping them company during the pandemic and how access to devices reduced loneliness.

• Students saw AI as a social entity - something to communicate with and through.

• Students accepted AI as they do other human beings.

• AI is coming - we should embrace it

How I coded the responses?

You might be curious how I went about finding the codes, and eventually the themes. Below is an extract from a small part of the interviews. Note the different colour text represents a child’s words. The bold capital font is me, the interviewer.

Notice the words ‘them’ and ‘they’ surface in the text. This emerged as a final theme.

A word on the findings

One of the limitations of this study was the lack of time to act on the findings. This was simply a symptom of the process - Interview first, then extract codes. The findings emerge after the study concludes so all you can do is feedback. Once the time beyond the ‘testing window’ has elapsed, the study is done, but a need remains.

This need will inform the next steps - a 50k word thesis, then a VIVA. In this study, children were the main actors and their views were key. To conclude, here are my opinions on why these three themes might have emerged. I would welcome comments and suggestions in the chat field below as I plan to explore these themes in mored depth soon.

A reminder of the final 3 themes

Theme 1 - THEM and THEY

This intrigued me. Almost all the participants in this set of interviews referred to AI with ‘them’ or ‘they’. Easy to miss in the text if it had not been so prevalent. It got me thinking about the Why?

Do children consider AI as equal to humans? It certainly seems so. Some even went as far as to suggest AI had feelings so should be treated as equal. By contrast, much of the literature associated with AI speaks about dominance: one way of another -human by machine or machine by human. Adults it seems view AI within a hierarchical structure in as much as we (humans) designed it - we have the power. Furthermore, the children hinted at a symbiosis between human, nature and machines - all things being equal and in balance. There are parallels to the post-human domain here which is an expansive territory.

There was also the issue of identity - how students saw AI in relation to themselves as a possible companion species. This unconscious coupling emerged a few times during the opportunity and potential interviews. It seems children are open to the idea that AI could offer them support, companionship and deter loneliness. The links to the pandemic were evident here too - themes of isolation, desperation and reliance were abundant.

Theme 2 - Teachers will not be replaced by robots

Phew! I was glad to hear their views on this. To be clear, robots and AI are not the same thing and the children knew this. They used the robot as a metaphor for machine learning, and AI. The children felt the teacher would endure but for purely pragmatic reasons. I will share some of the lines of thinking below:

Imagine an artificial teacher. They could encourage you, reward you, then punish you, haha.

It would be funny to throw something at the AI teacher to see what they did. Can’t imagine they could do much, would be chaos.

What would it do if you didn’t bother with homework. Maybe it would call home - that be funny, my dad would freak.

So, teachers - are jobs are safe for now it seems.

Theme 3 - Humans need to focus on being more human - less machine

Wow, what an insight and so true. The children felt that AI would essentially force us to be more human. They surprised me with words like sentient, consciousness and mimicking. Clearly they felt the key to our future was a convergence of sorts - living with machines not against them. Peace was almost a theme, but did not occur enough in the text to justify its inclusion. Interestingly, Elon Musk was also a theme but appeared mostly in the threats part of the process.

This final insight got me thinking about the words of Foucault when he asked ‘what are we capable of becoming?’

Perhaps the final words in this sense are best suited to Donna Harraway, author of The Cyborg Manifesto, 1985.

We humans are the machines, and we are responsible for the boundaries.