Colleges are going all in on artificial intelligence. But it could be a long time before independent research emerges on how it should—or shouldn’t—be used to improve learning outcomes.
Another downside of the existing research on AI in the classroom is that most studies focus on specific tools. For instance, after the CSU system signed a $17 million contract with OpenAI in 2025, it surveyed close to 100,000 faculty and students about which tools they use most often and why; most of them said ChatGPT.
“These tools are being treated the way an intervention would be treated in research, asking if a specific tool works,” Alicea said. “But if we’re seeing over 1,000 tools on the market for students right now, there’s no way we’re going to run 1,000 studies on all of them at a time when education funding is getting cut and we have tons of privacy concerns about student data.” Instead of studying individual tools, “we should be studying the features across tools,” she said. “And it’s not just the tools themselves—it’s how they interact with all of the other tools teachers and students are using.”
That’s not the only barrier to assessing AI’s usefulness in the classroom.
“Can you get students to use AI tools consistently enough to even test whether or not they’re effective?” said Carly Robinson, director of research at Stanford University’s Systems Change Advancing Learning and Equity initiative, which tracks emerging research on AI and education. “The design has to be really deliberate just to get students to engage with these tools in the first place.”
Although high-quality causal research is slow going, the limited findings so far support a measured approach to AI adoption in higher education.
“There is increasing evidence that AI has the potential to benefit learning, but using it on its own without intentional design or guardrails probably reduces learning through cognitive offloading,” Robinson said. “There’s logic to the idea that AI can improve learning and potential for it to be transformational in education, but we’re a ways off from that.”
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