When OpenAI released ChatGPT in the fall of 2022, the future of K-12 public education changed dramatically. Educators now have tools to instantaneously generate any teaching resource they need. Teachers could soon use artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver lesson content. As a result, public school districts might consider using AI to replace teacher labor. Replacing teacher labor with AI could then radically change traditional school staffing models. It is currently unclear whether K-12 public school students can develop trust in AI as they do in their human teachers. If public schools adopt AI and their students are unable to develop trust in it, then students could doubt the information that AI provides, and their learning could suffer.

The purpose of this study was to answer the question: what is the impact of knowledge of a teacher’s humanity on students’ level of trust in them? This study involved an experiment with three treatment groups watching two different 10-minute documentary videos. Each group had varying levels of knowledge of the narrator’s humanity, versus artificial intelligence. We created a psychological scale based on Rotenberg’s (2010) Basis, Domain, and Target Dimension framework and administered it to our 48 student participants after they watched each video. We used analysis of variance (ANOVA) and found statistically significant differences in trust levels between each group. The group with information that both of their narrators were human had double the level of trust of the control group, which learned that both of their teacher narrators were AI.

Authors:
Timothy Mattison, University of Southern Indiana, United States
Julie Conrad, University of Southern Indiana, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Mattison is an Assistant Professor in Teacher Education at the University of Southern Indiana. His research focuses on educational equity and social justice movements in secondary schools. He is currently studying student trust in AI.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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