Science Teacher Perceptions of the State of Knowledge and Education at the Advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence Popularity

The purpose of this study was to gauge the attitudes towards artificial intelligence (AI) use in the science classroom by science teachers at the start of generative AI chatbot popularity (March 2023). The lens of distributed cognition afforded an opportunity to gather thoughts, opinions, and perceptions from 24 secondary science educators as well as three AI chatbots. Purposeful sampling was used to form the initial science educator focus groups, and both human and AI participants individually responded to an attitudes survey as well as an epistemic cognition questionnaire over a 2-week period. In addition to participating in the study, AI—specifically OpenAI’s ChatGPT—was used to create two of the three survey instruments and served as an analysis tool for the qualitative results of this mixed-methods study. Results from the qualitative data suggest that secondary science educators are cautiously optimistic about the inclusion of AI in the classroom; however, there is a need to modify teacher preparation to incorporate AI training. Further, ethical concerns were identified about plagiarism, knowledge generation, and what constitutes original thinking with AI use. A one-way ANOVA revealed that there was a significant effect of subject taught on attitudes towards AI in the classroom p < 0.05 level for the four conditions: F(3, 23) = 6.743, p = .002. The partial eta squared of 0.47 indicates a large effect size with practical significance. This study serves as an artifact of knowledge about knowledge at the beginning of a technological revolution.