Exploring Teachers' Perception of Artificial Intelligence: The Socio-emotional Deficiency as Opportunities and Challenges in Human-AI Complementarity in K-12 Education

TL;DR

This study explores elementary teachers' perceptions of AI in K-12 education, highlighting its potential to automate tasks and personalize learning, while emphasizing socio-emotional limitations as both challenges and opportunities.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into teachers' nuanced views on AI's role, emphasizing socio-emotional deficiencies as key considerations for AI integration in education.

Findings

AI can automate administrative tasks and personalize learning.

Socio-emotional capabilities of AI are seen as both a challenge and an opportunity.

Teachers' expectations of AI vary based on their roles and concerns.

Abstract

In schools, teachers play a multitude of roles, serving as educators, counselors, decision-makers, and members of the school community. With recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), there is increasing discussion about how AI can assist, complement, and collaborate with teachers. To pave the way for better teacher-AI complementary relationships in schools, our study aims to expand the discourse on teacher-AI complementarity by seeking educators' perspectives on the potential strengths and limitations of AI across a spectrum of responsibilities. Through a mixed method using a survey with 100 elementary school teachers in South Korea and in-depth interviews with 12 teachers, our findings indicate that teachers anticipate AI's potential to complement human teachers by automating administrative tasks and enhancing personalized learning through advanced intelligence. Interestingly, the deficit of AI's socio-emotional capabilities has been perceived as both challenges and opportunities. Overall, our study demonstrates the nuanced perception of teachers and different levels of expectations over their roles, challenging the need for decisions about AI adoption tailored to educators' preferences and concerns.