Technology Cannot Think For You

"We found AI use in 18 % of the lessons we observed," reports PhD candidate Annie Karoline Elgen. Together with colleagues Katherina Dodou and Lisbeth M. Brevik, she has analyzed video recordings of 75 Norwegian and English lessons from 20 classrooms in the research project EDUCATE.

The teachers showed a sound skepticism toward the technology. One teacher explained to the students that AI can provide both correct and incorrect information, and emphasized the importance of students knowing enough about a topic to evaluate the answers from AI. Another teacher warned that AI "is not a critical object. Not a thinking object. It is artificial intelligence, so it will not be critical."

"It was encouraging to see how several teachers made the students aware of the need to think critically about AI", says Katherina Dodou.

The findings show that knowledge of how AI works is essential for using it appropriately.

Facts

• GenAI stands for generative artificial intelligence. An example is ChatGPT from OpenAI.
• Such dialogue based AI assistants can generate text, audio, video, images, and programming code based on prompts.
• In the article "Teaching with and about GenAI: A video study of English and Norwegian lessons in secondary classrooms in Norway" (2026), Elgen, Dodou and Brevik examined 75 school lessons from 2023-24, spread across 20 classrooms and five schools covering 10th grade and Vg3.
• This was the year after OpenAI launched its language model ChatGPT.
• The teachers had not been instructed to use or discuss AI.

How Teachers Used AI

In an English class for 10th grade, students were to write a film script. They were encouraged to feed their script into an AI-model to receive feedback.

In another 10th grade English class, students worked with a difficult text about apartheid. As part of the assignment, the teacher asked them to use AI to create a simpler version, after which the students compared it with the original to verify the content.

"In this case, the teacher exploited AI's ability to adapt content to an individual's level," says Elgen.

• In Vg3, several classes used AI while working with Henrik Ibsen's Gengangere. In some classrooms, students entered prompts containing details from the stage directions into the AI, aiming for a richer visual representation of the play's atmosphere.

• In another Vg3 class, students interacted with a chatbot programmed to portray a character from the play, to gain a deeper understanding of that character. The teacher said: "You get, in many ways, ideas/input about Mrs Alving that are very valuable."

Teaching Subject Matter and AI Simultaneously

"What the examples above have in common is that the students practiced using AI while acquiring subject knowledge," explains Professor Lisbeth M. Brevik, project leader for EDUCATE and professor at ILS.

The teachers therefore taught with and about AI at the same time, using their subject expertise to decide when AI was appropriate.

"We see that the subject and AI often overlap," says Brevik.

Elgen points out that although digital tools offer many possibilities for teaching content, it is important to clarify the learning goal for students, as several teachers did:

"What should the students learn in the subject, and what should they learn about AI?

AI competence means understanding what AI is, how it works, and how to use it responsibly and appropriately."

Successfully teaching with and about AI requires both subject competence and solid digital competence from teachers.

The teachers demonstrated this by solving challenges that arose when students practiced using AI. They made students aware of the importance of digital judgment when encountering AI and used AI in ways that supported subject specific learning.

Annie Karoline Elgen is writing a doctoral dissertation on how generative artificial intelligence is used and discussed in Norwegian and English at lower secondary and upper secondary schools.

She also works as a teacher at Hartvig Nissens school. Elgen participates in the public sector PhD programme; her project is integrated into the research project Evaluation of the Curriculum Renewal in Subjects (EDUCATE) at the Institute of Teacher Education and School Research (ILS).

AI Use Must Be Conscious

Elgen stresses how crucial it is that students acquire fundamental skills.and do not let a language model take over essential processes involved in developing reading and writing abilities. Some students, however, are tempted to let the technology do the work for them.

In a 10th grade English lesson, students used ChatGPT to obtain answers to questions distributed for a discussion about Baz Luhrmann's movie Romeo + Juliet. According to the students, they were only supposed to use the answers as "inspiration."

"It did not seem that the students understood the difference between receiving finished answers from a machine and working with the text to formulate answers themselves," says Elgen.

Even though they were aware that they should not cheat with AI, they used it in ways that were not particularly conducive to their own learning. Similar use was observed in other 10th grade lessons.

Elgen emphasizes that helping students grasp the nuanced differences between appropriate and inappropriate AI use, is decisive for them to employ the technology in ways that strengthen rather than weaken their learning.

She cites a recent UNICEF report confirming that students themselves find the regulations unclear, and call for clear rules for AI use in school.

"There are large variations from school to school regarding guidelines for AI-use. Both teachers and students would benefit from clear, locally defined rules."

Source

"Teaching with and about GenAI: A video study of English and Norwegian lessons in secondary classrooms in Norway" (2026) by Annie Karoline Elgen, Katherina Dodou & Lisbeth M. Brevik.

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