Mathematics

'Personalized' Learning in Math Has Proved Elusive and Overhyped. Can AI Offer a Breakthrough? — Educators are using AI to make math feel more personal by tying problems to students’ interests and real-world contexts, but the article says the approach is still promising rather than proven. Technical limits and uncertain evidence of better engagement or learning mean the idea is still a work in progress.

Math teacher Al Rabanera has a new tool in his decades-long quest to ensure his students, most of whom come from low-income families and marginalized backgrounds, see themselves in the curriculum.

Artificial Intelligence.

Many of of Rabanera’s students at La Vista High School in Fullerton, Calif., an alternative high school, struggled to learn in a traditional setting. But they care deeply about how their classwork connects to the working world.

Explore the Survey Results Mathematics Reports Student Achievement in Math: 5 Trends in K-12 Education Based on a 2026 survey, this report highlights challenges that students have in math as they move from early grades to secondary schools.

So, when Rabanera taught rate of change—a statistical concept—he asked a large language model to create an assignment that would help his students better understand a highly relevant topic: the job market.

“Personalizing” lessons to students’ interests—especially in math, a subject that many middle and high schoolers find dry and irrelevant—has been held out as one of the most promising potential upsides of generative AI, the technology that powers large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini.

Educators and researchers see a path to capitalize on the technology’s power and get at the elusive goal of customizing lessons for individual students’ interests, even if years of failed and overhyped attempts at innovation offer reasons for skepticism.
How Two Schools Are Rethinking Math for English Learners — Two schools are trying different ways to make math more accessible for English learners, including teaching with strong language supports in English and Spanish or teaching entirely in Spanish. Both models aim to build confidence and understanding, but finding bilingual teachers and managing math vocabulary are still major challenges.

At the beginning of a recent math class, students spent six minutes discussing a topic they knew well: themselves.

What’s their favorite food? Answers came in English and Spanish—“todo” (everything), or “naranja” (orange).

Then, students used the commercial platform Kahoot to review a previous lesson on stretching and compressing graphs. As answers were revealed, 10th grader Joel Fabian Severino, an English learner, shouted “yo sabia!” (I knew it).

Explore the Survey Results Mathematics Reports Student Achievement in Math: 5 Trends in K-12 Education Based on a 2026 survey, this report highlights challenges that students have in math as they move from early grades to secondary schools.

At Annandale High School in Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., Algebra I Plus is a double-block, daily class offered in English and designed for multilingual learners.

Many students say it’s their favorite course.

Joel credits his teachers with offering clear explanations of concepts, consistent support, and a level of rigor that feels challenging—but manageable.

One of the biggest barriers for secondary English learners in math is not computation, but language.

The subject’s complex vocabulary can undermine both confidence and engagement.

Computer Science

AI doesn’t just help us think, it thinks instead of us: what this means for the process of learning — This piece warns that generative AI can make learning feel easier while skipping the hard thinking that builds understanding. It argues that students still need to question, verify, and work toward truth rather than rely on polished AI output.

Deep in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, Socrates describes prisoners chained inside a cave, mistaking shadows cast on a wall by firelight for reality itself. They name the shadows, debate them and develop expertise about them. The prisoners are completely, sincerely wrong, and they have no idea. The cave isn’t a place of stupidity, it’s a place of convincing, well-organised illusion.

But Plato’s real interest wasn’t the cave, it was in the periagoge – a Greek word meaning the turning of the soul away from shadows and toward the light. For Plato, this was education itself: not the filling of an empty vessel with facts, but a fundamental reorientation of how a person relates to truth and how they come to know that truth.

The shadows persist but today they aren’t cast by firelight, they are generated by machines. Large language models (LLMs), image making and AI-powered search produce outputs that are fluent, confident and immediate.

But here’s the crucial difference from Plato’s original problem, his shadows were at least connected to something real. What AI produces is different in that a language model has no built-in commitment to truth, only a statistical relationship to an enormous quantity of text.

When it tells you something, it isn’t reporting, it’s composing.

The outputs can be correct. But they can also be wrong in ways that are structurally indistinguishable from being right.

The shadow no longer flutters on a cave wall, it speaks now, and sometimes it speaks beautifully.
Can AI save teachers time and reduce burnout? — Some teachers say AI is helping them save hours on planning and feedback, which may lower stress and help them stay in the profession longer. Still, the article says schools need clear training and guardrails so AI reduces work instead of adding new complications.

Staffed Up is a monthly series examining school staffing best practices and solutions for teacher recruitment and retention.

When Linda Noble first heard a few years ago about how she could apply artificial intelligence to her role as a social studies high school teacher, one of her first thoughts was that it might prevent her early retirement.

Now Noble, who is 66 years old, said AI has allowed her to save seven to eight hours on a weekly basis at her current job teaching 9th and 10th graders at Brooklyn College Academy in New York City.

“It’s not as physically and mentally and emotionally taxing on me, because I have a thought partner,” she said about how the teaching profession changed with the advent of AI.

Noble also acknowledged, however, that AI use in classrooms requires careful guardrails and that teachers need to be mindful of when it is and isn't appropriate to use AI tools.

Can AI reduce teacher burnout?

AI offers promising solutions for reducing teacher stress and potentially keeping them in the education field longer, K-12 researchers say.

How and whether AI can help teachers save time and be more efficient is a big question researchers are exploring, said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
Kids Are Turning to AI Before Adults for Homework Help — A Common Sense Media survey suggests many young people are already using AI for schoolwork, and nearly a quarter would ask a chatbot before turning to an adult. The findings raise concerns about overreliance, privacy, and the need for better guidance on safe and critical AI use.

Nearly a quarter of 9- to 17-year-olds say they would turn to a chatbot for help with schoolwork or homework before seeking guidance from a trusted adult such as a teacher, counselor, or parent.

That shift signals a growing reliance on AI as a first-stop resource for problem-solving and decisionmaking among young people.

Those are among the findings in a new report from Common Sense Media , a nonprofit that researches and advocates for healthy tech use among youth.

Adolescents are regularly using AI for school and emotional support, the survey found. And kids who struggle with schoolwork and socialization report using AI more frequently.

The vast majority of 9- to 17-year-olds use AI. And of those adolescents, 85% have used AI for schoolwork or homework, with about half of them using it weekly, and a fifth using it daily.

Kids are adopting AI far more quickly than they did social media, said Michael Robb, the head of research at Common Sense Media.

The report’s findings should be an eye-opener for adults, he said.

“AI is already a part of childhood in a way I think maybe people haven’t really grappled with yet,” he said.

“This is not about the future. This is happening right now across different age bands, across gender, across race and income levels as well.”

Mathematics

Computer Science

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