A Bermudian researcher living in the US was awarded more than $75,000 to examine how students would like artificial intelligence to be used in schools.

Katie Davis’s team at the University of Washington was among 15 groups selected out of more than 400 applicants to receive a Vision Grant from the Spencer Foundation.

She said: “I feel very honoured and very excited for the potential of our work to really make a meaningful difference in education and, by extension, the lives of students.”

The Spencer Foundation offers funds for research into educational developments.

Its Vision Grants programme was launched last year with the intention of bringing together teams of recipients "to develop ambitious, large-scale research projects focused on transforming educational systems towards greater equity“, the organisation’s website said.

Dr Davis, an associate professor at the university, said her research would look into “developing a community-based model for equitable AI practices in education settings”.

She explained that it would involve contacting pupils and their communities to find out what they would like to see from generative AI, which is a type of artificial intelligence technology that can produce content such as text, images and audio material.

Dr Davis said that the objective was to use the feedback “to try and guide the future for AI in education”.

She added that she decided to look into artificial intelligence because of its rapid growth and use in many different fields.

Dr Davis said: “There is a lot of interest in generative AI in many different contexts, including education.

“There’s a lot of people who are very worried about what this will mean for potential plagiarism or cheating in schools.

“In the United States there are lots of public schools who have just outright banned ChatGPT and other large language models. But there’s also, on the other hand, a lot of excitement.

“Khan Academy developed a ChatGPT-powered tutor called Khanmigo, and [founder Sal Khan has] given a TedTalk saying how this is going to revolutionise education.

“So on the one hand there’s a lot of nervousness and apprehension, but on the other hand there’s a lot of excitement.”

Dr Davis said that the Vision Grant would last for a year, and the team can apply for a further $3.5 million grant after showing its preliminary research collected over the 12 months.

She added that her team will work with other researchers in Nigeria and Pakistan to get a wider perspective of AI use in classrooms.

Dr Davis said that some preliminary research was carried out with youngsters and school communities.

She said that it was still too early in the project to share suggestions but the points raised were very promising.

The researcher added that she hoped the potential implementation of AI would shake up the school system after decades of stagnancy.

She explained: “Generally, the practices and the structures of schools are so ingrained and entrenched that when you introduce a new technology often it just gets absorbed into the way things are always done.

“I think that, if we don’t think in new ways about the potential of AI – as well as the potential misuses of AI – we’re going to see the same pattern of AI being absorbed into the way things are always done, and I think that would be a really big missed opportunity.”

Dr Davis plans to travel to Chicago this week to make contact and trade ideas with other grant winners at the Spencer Foundation’s headquarters.