GenAI in education: Potential and guardrails

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By An-Me Chung, Director and Strategic Advisor, New America.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), a type of AI that can create new content, has sparked both excitement and trepidation in formal and informal education settings. Like many, we at New America are exploring the vast opportunities AI offers while considering the necessary guardrails to ensure all young people have equitable access to meaningful learning opportunities.

The Potential of GenAI

In our Teaching, Learning, and Tech program, we have been discussing how AI could support long standing challenges in education. GenAI has the potential to consolidate information more efficiently, enhance personalized learning, and support open educational practices. By incorporating adaptive instruction, AI can tailor learning experiences to meet the diverse needs of all students.

And when high-quality materials are culturally responsive and teaching is done well, research shows that students not only learn academic content but also gain insights into language, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors across cultures. This, in turn, helps build their identities and fosters an understanding of societal expectations for themselves and others. Associated outcomes include enhancing youth engagement, improving academic achievement, supporting learning about various subjects, and influencing career interests.

AI can also streamline education systems and practices. For instance, AI could automate administrative tasks, freeing up educators to focus on helping young people develop mindsets and critical thinking skills—essential for problem-solving in today’s world. It can transform assessments by gathering data in real time to help educators better understand individual student needs. AI could also revolutionize the way Individualized Education Program (IEP) is managed by simplifying and enhancing communication between educators and families. An IEP is a plan that outlines the specialized instruction and services that a child with a disability needs to succeed in school. it could also translate materials into home languages and into clear and simple terms that are accessible to families.

Guardrails for GenAI

However, there are inherent risks to integrating AI, including bias and discrimination, privacy and safety, transparency, and ethical dilemmas that require thoughtful and careful consideration. Our educational institutions will need to safeguard student privacy and ensure that the use of AI is free from algorithmic discrimination. For this to occur, the integration of AI will need to be transparent, require human oversight and intervention, and adhere to principles such as those outlined in Universal Design Learning Guidelines.

This is especially important for ensuring that learners with disabilities have access to human educators who can address any challenges or biases that may arise from the use of AI. By aligning AI policy with these rights, we can harness the potential of AI to create more inclusive and equitable educational opportunities for all young people, including those with disabilities. To this end, New America and the Educating All Learners Alliance recently co-authored Prioritizing Students with Disabilities in AI Policy.

AI in Afterschool

In the realm of afterschool programs, institutions are beginning to explore how AI can be leveraged to promote youth agency. For example, the New York Hall of Science held the Humanistic Approaches to Artificial Intelligence Literacy Through Informal Learning Conference in October 2023. AI designers, learning scientists, researchers, formal and informal educators, youth development experts, and science center and industry professionals worked together to identify opportunities where informal learning could use AI to promote youth agency. The primary goal was to identify roles that informal learning institutions can play in fostering AI literacy and human agency with AI, putting diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion at the center of those efforts. Participants generated examples to provide informal educators with a starting point for program design.

Keeping up with the Resources

In formal education, schools, districts, and states are grappling with how to safely and effectively use, understand, and evaluate AI and many have developed implementation guidelines and frameworks. New America recently compiled some of these resources, but every day new resources emerge, such as The Landscape of Artificial Intelligence in K-12 Education, a Bellwether report, and Empowering Education Leaders: A Toolkit for Safe, Ethical, and Equitable AI Integration released by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology.