Elementary school students’ and teachers’ perceptions toward creative mathematical writing with Generative AI

Abstract

While mathematical creative writing can engage students in expressing mathematical ideas in an imaginative way, young learners struggle in this process. Generative AI (GenAI) offers possibilities for supporting them, such as providing story generation. As the design of GenAI-powered learning technologies requires careful consideration of the technology reception in classrooms, this study explores students’ and teachers’ perceptions of creative mathematical writing with the developed GenAI-powered technology. We adopted a qualitative thematic analysis of the interviews with 10 elementary school students and six teachers, triangulated with open-ended survey responses and classroom observation of 79 students. We identified six themes and 19 subthemes regarding benefits and challenges; perceived benefits include fostering creativity and understanding in math, AI literacy, and affective domain, while students- and AI-related challenges were identified as well. This study contributes by investigating the lived experience of GenAI-supported learning and the design considerations for GenAI-powered learning technologies and instructions.