Evidence from various domains underlines the critical role that human factors, and especially trust, play in adopting technology by practitioners. In the case of Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered tools, the issue is even more complex due to practitioners' AI‐specific misconceptions, myths and fears (e.g., mass unemployment and privacy violations). In recent years, AI has been incorporated increasingly into K‐12 education. However, little research has been conducted on the trust and attitudes of K‐12 teachers towards the use and adoption of AI‐powered Educational Technology (AI‐EdTech). This paper sheds light on teachers' trust in AI‐EdTech and presents effective professional development strategies to increase teachers' trust and willingness to apply AI‐EdTech in their classrooms. Our experiments with K‐12 science teachers were conducted around their interactions with a specific AI‐powered assessment tool (termed AI‐Grader) using both synthetic and real data. The results indicate that presenting teachers with some explanations of (i) how AI makes decisions, particularly compared to the human experts, and (ii) how AI can complement and give additional strengths to teachers, rather than replacing them, can reduce teachers' concerns and improve their trust in AI‐EdTech. The contribution of this research is threefold. First, it emphasizes the importance of increasing teachers' theoretical and practical knowledge about AI in educational settings to gain their trust in AI‐EdTech in K‐12 education. Second, it presents a teacher professional development program (PDP), as well as the discourse analysis of teachers who completed it. Third, based on the results observed, it presents clear suggestions for future PDPs aiming to improve teachers' trust in AI‐EdTech. Practitioner notes: What is already known about this topic Human factors, and especially trust, play a critical role in practitioners' adoption of technology. In recent years, AI has been incorporated increasingly into K‐12 education. Little research has been conducted on the trust and attitudes of K‐12 teachers towards the use and adoption of AI‐powered Educational Technology. What this paper adds This research emphasizes the importance of increasing teachers' theoretical and practical knowledge about AI in educational settings to gain their trust in AI‐EdTech in K‐12 education. It presents a teacher professional development program (PDP) to increase teachers' trust in AI‐EdTech, as well as the discourse analysis of teachers who completed it. It presents clear suggestions for future PDPs aiming at improving teachers' trust in AI‐EdTech. Implications for practice and/or policy Pre‐ and in‐service teacher education programs that aim to increase teachers' trust in AI‐EdTech should include a section providing teachers with a basic understanding of AI. PDPs aimed to increase teachers' trust in AI‐EdTech should focus on concrete pedagogical tasks and specific AI‐powered tools that are considered by teachers as helpful and worth the effort to learn. AI‐EdTech should not restrict teachers to follow specific pedagogical scenarios, but rather provide teachers with the freedom to design and implement various types of pedagogies that meet their preferences, students' needs, and classroom reality. Teacher agency is key to gaining their trust. AI‐EdTech should allow teachers to review, modify, and if necessary, override AI‐based recommendations before they are sent to students.

AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, are being increasingly used by students in higher education institutions. While these tools provide opportunities for improved teaching and education, they also pose significant challenges for assessment and learning outcomes. We conceptualize these challenges through the lens of vulnerability, the potential for university assessments and learning outcomes to be impacted by student use of generative AI. We investigate the potential scale of this vulnerability by measuring the degree to which AI assistants can complete assessment questions in standard university-level Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses. Specifically, we compile a dataset of textual assessment questions from 50 courses at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and evaluate whether two AI assistants, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 can adequately answer these questions. We use eight prompting strategies to produce responses and find that GPT-4 answers an average of 65.8% of questions correctly, and can even produce the correct answer across at least one prompting strategy for 85.1% of questions. When grouping courses in our dataset by degree program, these systems already pass the nonproject assessments of large numbers of core courses in various degree programs, posing risks to higher education accreditation that will be amplified as these models improve. Our results call for revising program-level assessment design in higher education in light of advances in generative AI.

The increasing availability of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has created a necessity for personalized course recommendation systems. These systems often combine neural networks with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to achieve richer representations of learners and courses. While these enriched representations allow more accurate and personalized recommendations, explainability remains a significant challenge which is especially problematic for certain domains with significant impact such as education and online learning. Recently, a novel class of recommender systems that uses reinforcement learning and graph reasoning over KGs has been proposed to generate explainable recommendations in the form of paths over a KG. Despite their accuracy and interpretability on e-commerce datasets, these approaches have scarcely been applied to the educational domain and their use in practice has not been studied. In this work, we propose an explainable recommendation system for MOOCs that uses graph reasoning. To validate the practical implications of our approach, we conducted a user study examining user perceptions of our new explainable recommendations. We demonstrate the generalizability of our approach by conducting experiments on two educational datasets: COCO and Xuetang.

Evidence from various domains underlines the key role that human factors, and especially, trust, play in the adoption of AI-based technology by professionals. As AI-based educational technology is increasingly entering K-12 education, it is expected that issues of trust would influence the acceptance of such technology by educators as well, but little is known about this matter. In this work, we bring the opinions and attitudes of science teachers that interacted with several types of AI-based technology for K-12. Among other things, our findings indicate that teachers are reluctant to accept AI-based recommendations when it contradicts their previous knowledge about their students and that they expect AI to be absolutely correct even in situations that absolute truth may not exist (e.g., grading open-ended questions). The purpose of this paper is to provide initial findings and start mapping the terrain of this aspect of teacher-AI interaction, which is critical for the wide and effective deployment of AIED technologies in K-12 education.