1.5 Current State of AI in Education

Take Home message

 

• TheTechnical EUunderstanding AIand Actcritical isthinking: teachers and students need to understand how language models work (training, data handling, predictive nature) and develop practical verification skills, from spotting fabricated citations to fact-checking AI-generated content.

Responsible use and ethical stance: a grasp of the legal basis.and Theethical EU’slandscape rulebook(AI Act, GDPR) is needed, along with an approach to AI as a support rather than a substitute for AIhuman isthinking, grounded in force since August 2024transparency and phasingaccountability, plus explicit instruction in throughprompting 2027.as Ita appliesteachable notskill. justEquity techand companies,new butassessment alsomodels: equitable access to schools.AI ...tools needs safeguarding (public funding, open models, minimum age policies), alongside a shift in assessment from grading the final product to evaluating the process and students' ability to critically engage with AI output.

If you remember only one sentence from this page: AI is already present in educational contexts but is not regulated. Structured frameworks are needed to support educators' professional development improving their knowledge and letting them teach with AI and about AI.

Current Uses of AI in Educational Contexts

Nowadays, artificial intelligence (AI) is embedded in everyday educational practice, well beyond pilot projects. Common applications include adaptive learning platforms, intelligent tutoring systems, automated grading, and AI-assisted lesson planning for teachers (OECD, 2026). The most visible shift, however, is the direct use of general-purpose tools by students and teachers alike. According to OECD's TALIS survey, 37% of lower secondary teachers reported using AI in their work in 2024, and 57% said it helps them improve lesson plans — though 72% also expressed concern about students passing off AI-generated work as their own (OECD, 2026). The OECD cautions that better task performance does not always mean genuine learning, warning of a risk of "metacognitive laziness" when cognitive work is offloaded to AI without pedagogical guidance.

Current State of Teaching With AI

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Current State of Teaching About AI

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AI Usage Across Educational Levels

What is missing?

Alongside institutional frameworks and adoption data, it is important to understand how these dynamics play out in practice. A series of workshops was conducted with education stakeholders — including teachers — to gather first-hand perspectives on the current use of AI in teaching. These workshops surfaced a set of concrete needs and concerns expressed by educators, covering practical, pedagogical, and training-related aspects. The following sections outline these needs in detail.

• Understanding How AI Works. Both students and teachers need to understand how language models are built and trained, and what happens to their data once provided. They also need to grasp the nature of these models as prediction engines rather than databases, which explains their tendency to hallucinate. In light of this, teachersTeachers need a simple, formula-free,simple high-level course covering the basics of how LLMs work.
• Critical Thinking, Questioning and Verifying AI. Students and teachers need to be able to question AI-generated answers,answers and to recogniserecognize fabricated citations that appear credible but aren't.information. Practical verification skills are also needed, from checking AI output against official sources to spotting AI-generated images and videos. Students need to shift from following instructions to formulating them, thinking critically about the desired output.
• Ethics, Data Protection and Regulation. A general understanding of the ethical and legal aspects of AI use is needed, including the EU AI Act and GDPR, alongside practical rules such as never entering names or personal data into public AI tools.GDPR. Safe and responsible use is essential to prevent illegal practices such as jailbreaking, along with awareness of related issues like bias in teaching materials and the unreliability of AI detectors.

Finally,Responsible Use. AI cannot be ignored or avoided, as doing so works against preparing students for its responsible use.

Responsible Use

A further set of points focused on attitude and human agency, rather than on rigid rules. AI was seen as a tool to support, rather than replace, human work,needs to be used mindfully withinas a hybridsupport, approachnot thata leavesreplacement, leaving room for students' own thinking. Transparency was identified as a key principle in this respect,matters, with students expected to indicateflag which parts ofare their workown, were their own. This approach was linked to the concept ofechoing "cyborg writing", a hybrid model in which humans and machines collaborate to draft, edit and refine text, treating generativewhere AI asextends anrather extensionthan ofreplaces the writer's cognitivethinking. process rather than a substitute for it. Closely related to this is the principle of studentStudent ownership and accountability,accountability wherebyare attributingalso aneeded. mistake

Practical Skills. Prompting needs to the AI is considered a failure of the student's own review process. Finally, participants noted that AI can mask personal weaknesses, a dynamic that may be either beneficial or problematic depending on the context. 

Practical Skills

Participants agreed that prompting and tool use should be treated as a teachable skills,skill, rather thannot something studentsacquired are expected to acquire on their own.independently. Both teachers and students were seen as needingneed explicit instruction in how to writewriting effective prompts, whileand teachers additionally requiredneed training in prompt engineering to designfor lesson plans,planning, differentiate skill levelsdifferentiation, and support grading. PromptingBroader wastool familiarity is also framed as a technical competence in its own right, closely linkedneeded to thematch abilitytools to provide AI systems with the right information, for instance in debugging tasks. More broadly, participants highlighted the value of using AI as an assistant and co-creator, as well as the importance of being familiar with the wider landscape of available tools, beyond ChatGPT alone, in order to identify which tool is best suited to which subject.

subjects.

Equity and Infrastructure

Infrastructure. Access to

ConcernsAI wereis alsoat raisedthe regardingcentre of growing equity and access. Financial disparities were identifiedconcerns, as a key issue, with wealthier districts able tocan afford better and more expensive AI tools, thereby widening competence gaps between schoolsschools. andPublic institutions.funding Tois addressneeded this,to participantsguarantee called forequal access toregardless AI tools to be guaranteed by states or national governments, with some expressingof a preferenceschool's forresources, preferring open AI models over corporate ones.ones Theas questionpart of anthis appropriateeffort. A minimum age for AI access wasuse also raised, with reference madeneeds to Norway,be where AI use is currently banned in elementary schools.

defined. Assessment. Assessment

Participants also discussed the need for aA different approach to assessment.assessment Ratheris needed, focused on process rather than grading only the final product, emphasis was placed on assessing the process itself, together withincluding students' reflections on AI-generated drafts. This includes AI-integrated assignments inare whichalso needed, grading students are graded on their ability to critique, fact-check and edit AI output, anraising approachquestions that raises the broader question of whereabout the human role lies when teachers themselves also rely on AI for grading. Participants also stressed the importance of showing students AI's mistakes in a way appropriate to their age and level. A number of concreteConcrete classroom methods wereare proposedneeded intoo, thissuch respect, includingas fact-checking AI-generatedAI text, comparing responseschatbot from two different chatbots,responses, debating theAI use ofin AI as part of homework assignments,homework, and deliberately incorporating non-digital tools,tools suchlike asflip flipcharts,charts. into classroom activities.