High school students are divided on whether they should use generative AI tools for school, and most of those who did found errors in what these tools produced, according to a new report from ACT.
Dr. Jeff SchielACT
For the report, "High School Students’ Use and Impressions of AI Tools", ACT researchers asked 4,006 10th to 12th-grade students nationally about their AI usage and their views on such tools. The students surveyed were those who had registered to take the national ACT test, said report author Dr. Jeff Schiel, a lead research scientist at ACT.
A little less than half of the students surveyed responded that they had used AI tools (46%), the majority having used chatbot ChatGPT (83%). 40% of students responded that they used “Other AI tools,” 17% said AI image generation tool Dall-E 2, and 19% said they used chatbots Bing Chat and Google Bard.
About half of the students who had used AI tools told ACT they used them for school assignments (46%), with most students (64%) using the tools a few times a month or less for assignments. 27% said they employed the tools at most a few times a week, and 8% used them at least once a day.
Writing in language arts was why most students used AI tools (66%), followed by social studies (49%), according to the survey. Computer science and programming was found to be the least common reason for such tool use (17%).
“One interesting finding in this study was the relationship between students’ academic achievement level (as measured by ACT Composite scores) and AI tool use,” the report noted. “Students with higher academic performance were significantly more likely to use AI tools than were students with lower academic performance.”
To note, about two-thirds of users reported noticing errors or incorrect information in their AI-produced schoolwork content (63%), meaning most students are at least aware of the imperfections and flaws that come with such tools.
