ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION

Artificial Intelligence (AI) gradually infiltrates even more areas of social communication. This paper is aimed at one of the most important concerns of the future of education: the narratives of teachers and students about the future role of AI in public education. According to a report of the Congressional Research Service (2018), there are four different areas where AI can be particularly used for educational purposes. 1) Tutoring by Intelligent Tutoring Systems. 2) Personalisation of learning by tailoring the learning material, pace, sequence, and difficulty level. 3) Testing with computer adaptive assessments that adjust the difficulty of successive questions based on the accuracy of the student's answers. 4) Automating tasks like taking attendance, grading assignments, and generating test questions. To systematically map up the narratives and the opinions about applying AI in the above-mentioned areas, a questionnaire among Hungarian secondary school students with more than 600 respondents was conducted and amended with 10 semi-structured interviews with pedagogues from the same school level. As the results showed, the predominant narrative of teachers is the irreplaceability of persons in teaching, which also appears in student narratives to some extent. Meanwhile, students are more open to proliferating technologies and stand at a higher level of awareness towards the potentials of AI comparing to their teachers. Most importantly, students regard AI as part of their everyday life while they do not report their schools being institutionally ready to involve these developments. Consequently, crucial policy decisions must be made when it comes to the systematic implementation of AI in public education, bridging the gap between the reality of students and the schools, involving this issue into the teacher education as well.