Pilot Study on Concerns of Teachers of Using Artificial Intelligence in Learning and Teaching

With prevalent applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in daily lives worldwide, harnessing AI is investigated to learn and teach K-12 contexts. It has drawn much attention from researchers and practitioners in education. Teachers are "gatekeepers" of pedagogical innovations in schools. Thus, this study reports the result of investigating teachers’ concerns about adopting AI in education through the Concern-Based Adoption Model (CBAM). This model is composed of 5 theoretical categories of teachers’ concerns, namely Consequence (C), Evaluation (E), Information (I), Management (M), and Refocusing (R). Participants in this study were 38 Hong Kong high-school teachers who participated in an induction seminar about how AI leverages to support educational activities. The data collection was carried out right after the seminar through a questionnaire-based CBAM survey on the participants’ concerns about adopting AI in practice. The result indicates the concerns of E, I, and M. The study result not only preliminarily helps to provide the bases for future work to address high-school teachers’ needs related to AI in education. It also lays an empirical foundation for conducting a larger-scale study on probing into teachers’ concerns about harnessing this pedagogical innovation in K-12 education.