A comprehensive study from the Center for Universal Education at Brookings Institution, A New Direction for Students in an AI World: Prosper, Prepare, Protect, outlines the potential benefits of integrating generative AI into the education setting. These benefits impact both teachers and students.
In a broad sense, teachers benefit most by using generative AI to increase productivity and replace time-consuming routine tasks, like lesson planning, grading, assignment design, and administrative work. This frees up their time, which can be reallocated to what the report calls “high-yield activities,” such as offering differentiated support, providing individualized feedback, and building student relationships.
For students, AI is most beneficial when it offers personalized learning opportunities. This might be through the use of adaptive learning platforms, writing tools, or tutoring programs.
With this broader context in mind, the report lists six specific benefits.
Benefit #1: “AI can improve equity by addressing educational resource gaps and expanding access to education.”
The resource gaps alluded to here include things like staff shortages, budget shortfalls, and knowledge gaps. In the case of staff shortages, generative AI chatbots won’t replace teachers, but they can be used to give students additional and improved access to feedback and learning interactions.
In the United States, this might involve students getting AI tutoring in classrooms that are overcrowded or when teachers don’t have the time or capacity to provide adequate one-on-one assistance to their students. For students in underdeveloped countries, it might mean gaining some kind of access when they previously had none available at all.
Another added benefit is that, at least for now, many of the generative AI resources provide a free tier of their product, making it financially accessible to anyone with a device, an internet connection, and a school environment where the website is allowed to be accessed.
Benefit #2: “AI can optimize teacher time for greater focus on students.”
The teachers surveyed in this study said they use AI primarily for automating tasks that take them a lot of time. This includes tasks like responding to parent emails, grading and providing feedback, translating materials, and creating worksheets, rubrics, quizzes, and lesson plans. In some cases, it also meant using AI to help grade essays or tutor students.
The report cites studies that show teacher productivity gains to be both “significant and measurable.” In lesson planning alone, teachers experienced a 31% reduction in planning time when using AI, saving them an average of 25 minutes per week. Results also indicate that this efficiency gain did not compromise quality, and the AI versus human-generated content was essentially indistinguishable.
A related survey conducted by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation reported that teachers using AI saved an average of 5.9 hours per week.
This improved efficiency has several important benefits. First of all, the time saved by using AI allows teachers to shift time spent on low-impact tasks to high-impact tasks. This means having more time to work directly supporting students, rather than on completing administrative or teacher-centric tasks. This reallocation of time could also be spent on relationship building, progress monitoring, giving feedback, and providing personalized instructional support.
In addition to these classroom benefits, the study also found that the ability for AI to help reduce teacher workload had the potential to improve teacher retention.
Benefit #3: “AI can improve student learning.”
The report suggests that when AI applications are “implemented in pedagogically and developmentally appropriate ways,” they “can meaningfully enhance student learning outcomes across multiple domains.”
Several example areas are described in the report, with one such area pointing out that learning improves when AI features, like quizzes and question-and-answer opportunities, are embedded into other resources, like textbooks.
Initial research also shows promise in using AI to improve literacy instruction, especially for students who are learning English as an additional language.
In the area of writing, where teachers may be nervous that students will simply allow the AI to do the work for them, there are multiple potential areas of benefit that are outlined. One is in process-based writing support, where the AI guides and assists students through the process of writing. Students say they feel more motivated, more empowered, and less self-conscious about their writing when guided by the AI. The AI is able to assist with every step in the writing process, from idea generation to drafting and editing to polishing the final draft.
Perhaps the greatest impact that AI has had in this area is its ability to provide personalized and immediate feedback. The study cites John Hattie’s research showing the impressive positive impact that feedback can have on student success.
Benefit #4: “AI can tailor learning to each student’s needs.”
This benefit can be illustrated through two impactful approaches: personalized learning programs and intelligent tutoring systems.
AI is making personalized learning systems much more of a reality because it can efficiently and effectively tailor instruction specific to each learner. These programs can often adapt in real time to what the student needs. While teachers have done this for years when they are able to sit down one-on-one with students, large class sizes and time constraints often make this one-on-one approach unrealistic.
The second part of this tailored learning experience is the use of intelligent tutoring systems. Research has consistently shown that high-dosage tutoring can positively impact student learning. Again, the challenge has been teacher capacity. This type of tutoring takes a lot of time—something that can often be hard to come by in teaching.
Benjamin Bloom is famous for calling this out as the “2 sigma problem,” which essentially states that students receiving one-on-one tutoring score two standard deviations higher than those without tutoring. The difficulty is making such intensive support scalable and economically feasible.
AI has the potential to solve that issue by making the tutoring experience cost-effective and accessible to all students.
Benefit #5: “AI can extend learning to neurodivergent students and students with disabilities.”
AI can make assistive technology more accessible and effective, and early research has indicated that AI-powered applications can appeal to individuals with autism spectrum disorder.
Studies have shown that AI applications can significantly help students with dyslexia as well, and AI continues to power up assistive technology tools like screen readers, voice-to-text, text-to-speech, alt-text generators, closed captions, and other communication aids.
Benefit #6: “AI can advance assessment.”
The report suggests that AI can positively transform assessment in three areas: automation, effectiveness, and expansiveness.
Automation of assessments is described as one of the most promising benefits provided by AI in education. AI can make assessment more cost-effective in terms of both creation and scoring. It enables very quick turnaround, providing immediate and granular feedback. Automated systems also tend to score student work more accurately and reliably than humans. In the areas of effectiveness and expansiveness, AI is transforming and expanding what assessment can measure as well as how it measures.
In addition to these powerful benefits, AI has also shown great promise in being able to predict which students may be at risk and in providing interventions to minimize future struggles.
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Relational Capacity
- Rigorous Academic Preparedness
- Opportunity Knowledge
- Student Agency
- Insist on Rigor
- Break Down Barriers
- Collective Educator Agency
Extend Your Learning
- A New Direction for Students in an AI World: Prosper, Prepare, Protect (The Center for Universal Education at Brookings Institution)
- The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring (Benjamin S. Bloom in Educational Researcher via the Massachusetts Institute of Technology)