Matthew Karabinos was hesitant to try ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence tool, when it first came out in 2022. The 6th grade math teacher was concerned about what the technology would mean for the education world, and more specifically, what it would mean for the role and the workload of a teacher.
It’s “a scary proposition” to have to reimagine teaching when the work is “already difficult,” Karabinos said. “That creates lots of fear and anxiety in an already tumultuous field.”
But by spring 2023, Karabinos was ready to see what all the buzz was about. It was the end of a marking period, and he needed to give students another graded assignment. At the time, he was also teaching reading, so he asked ChatGPT to create a quiz on prepositions for 6th grade students. He was impressed with the result.
“From there, it was just like, ‘OK, it did that really easily. What else can it do?’” said Karabinos, who teaches at Williamsburg Elementary School in Williamsburg, Pa.
He spent that summer signing up for programs about how to use AI in education and learning as much as he could about generative AI. Now, he uses it frequently for creating engaging math assignments.
Karabinos is among the 21 percent of math teachers who use AI for instructional planning or teaching, according to a February 2025 RAND report, which drew from a nationally representative survey of more than 9,000 K-12 public school teachers conducted in spring 2024.
The RAND report found that math and elementary teachers are less likely to report using AI tools or products for instructional planning or teaching than English/language arts, science, and secondary teachers.
“It’s not surprising that math teachers are a little reluctant to welcome this new technology,” said Gail Burrill, a mathematics specialist in the math education program at Michigan State University and a former president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
“Math is in a slightly different space than the other content areas,” Burrill said. Computer-assisted algebra and other algorithmic math tools have been around for a long time, but teachers “have been struggling with” how to integrate those technologies into the classroom.
Part of the reason that educators who teach math might be hesitant to try AI tools could be that most of them—68 percent—have not received any professional development on using AI to teach math, according to a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey of 411 teachers conducted in February.
There is also a small percentage of educators who teach math—11 percent—who think AI tools should never be introduced into math instruction, the EdWeek Research Center survey found. AI skeptics are concerned about the technology’s biases, its tendency to fabricate responses, and its potential effects on human creativity and cognition.
Still, teachers are experimenting with ways to incorporate generative AI tools into math instruction. For instance, they have reported using the technology for creating lesson plans and student materials, for differentiating instruction, and as a tutor for students.
In addition to ChatGPT, AI products math teachers are experimenting with include Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Google NotebookLM, MagicSchool, Perplexity, School AI, Claude, and Khanmigo.
Using AI to create lesson plans and student materials
Most math teachers who are using generative AI tools are doing so for lesson planning and creating student materials, such as quizzes, in-class activities, and homework assignments.
Karabinos has been reworking his lesson plans to align with Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms framework, an approach to engage students in deep thinking and problem-solving in math. Generative AI tools have “come in handy” for him in crafting “higher-order thinking tasks.”
Using an account with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, Karabinos built a custom GPT based on all the publicly available articles and research that have been released about Liljedahl’s framework so the GPT has a background on the best practices for developing “thinking tasks.”
Take that time back [with AI]. Use it for something wise, like building relationships with your students.
Then, Karabinos types in the learning goal, topic, or standard he wants to cover and asks the GPT to help him create a thinking task aligned with that goal.
“It gives me that first step so that I don’t have to literally sit down and find and research all these thinking tasks ahead of time,” Karabinos said. “They can be done in a matter of minutes, and I can just set them up the next day. It’s been absolutely vital for me doing that in my classroom, because there’s a lot of thinking tasks that are out there, but not a lot of them go with your specific curriculum.”
His students have been enjoying the assignments, coming in every day asking if it’s a “thinking task” day, Karabinos said. They like that they get to be out of their seats, working in groups to better understand the math concepts they’re learning, he said.
Math teachers turn to AI to differentiate and personalize instruction
AI tools have played a big role in how Ana Sepulveda teaches math to her 6th grade students at the School for the Talented and Gifted in Pleasant Grove in Dallas.
The Dallas school district is in the second year of using MATHia, an adaptive learning platform by Carnegie Learning, and Sepulveda said she has been a superuser, integrating the app into her daily lessons.
The platform, which students use for 15 minutes every day in class, provides personalized support based on what each student is struggling with, and Sepulveda said it makes it easy to analyze the data and figure out which concepts to spend more time on.
Sepulveda also uses generative AI tools to provide linguistic support for her dual-language students when they are doing a “translanguaging” activity—the process of making connections between their native language and the language they’re acquiring. She gives students the key math terms they need to know in Spanish and in English and then she encourages her students to use ChatGPT to help them relate the terms.
Students are using AI as a tutor to check their work
Many teachers have been hesitant to allow students to use AI tools to solve math problems, but Nick Phillips, who teaches calculus at Trinity High School in Washington, Pa., encourages his students to employ AI as a tutor.
“I encourage them to use it as a way to check their work or to work through a problem where they’re getting stuck,” Phillips said. “There’s over 100 of them and one of me,” and he can’t always get to every student who needs help on an assignment in time.
“My students are very talented—they excel in math,” Phillips said. “They might just need that one little piece of information” to get unstuck. Maybe they wrote –2 instead of +2, for instance. AI tools are a good way to get that extra help when a teacher is unavailable, he said.
Vicki Davis, who teaches computer science at Sherwood Christian Academy in Albany, Ga., also encourages her students to use artificial intelligence as a tutor. For instance, if she’s going over a complex computer science principle, she teaches her students how to prompt a generative AI tool to explain the topic to them in terms they understand.
For example: The student might prompt a generative AI tool by writing, “I’m in AP Computer Science Principles. I’m struggling to understand “iterative lists,” but I do understand soccer. Could you explain it to me in soccer terms and ask me questions to determine if I understood it?”
Teachers’ AI professional development needs vary widely
Math teachers say they want professional development on using the technology to teach math, according to the EdWeek Research Center survey.
The kind of professional development that teachers say they’d like depends on their experience level with the technology.
Those who don’t have a lot of experience said they’d like a basic overview of AI: what it is, how it works, and what its benefits and drawbacks are. Those who already know the basics are interested in learning about the tools that are out there and how they could use them in their work. Teachers who are already implementing AI in their classrooms are looking for training that would help them take what they’re already doing to the next level.
Advocates for incorporating AI into education say learning more about the technology is the first step in using it responsibly and realizing that it won’t replace humans. If used correctly, the technology can help lighten teachers’ workloads and get them thinking of new ways to teach math concepts, they say.
“It used to [take a] half hour or 45 minutes to make [an assignment] look pretty, make it look perfect, and make sure all the problems are exactly the way I need them,” Karabinos said. “Not anymore.”
“Take that time back [with AI],” he said. “Use it for something wise, like building relationships with your students.”
