Rene Kizilcec
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kizilcec.bsky.social
Rene Kizilcec
@kizilcec.bsky.social
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Associate Professor of Information Science @Cornell; PI, National Tutoring Observatory; Education; Learning; Technology, AI, Policy. Opinions are my own.
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kizilcec.bsky.social
@emmharv.bsky.social will be presenting our work on identifying harms from LLMs in education at CHI! Please check it out
emmharv.bsky.social Emma Harvey @emmharv.bsky.social · Mar 13
✨New Work✨ by me, @allisonkoe.bsky.social, and @kizilcec.bsky.social forthcoming at #CHI2025:

"Don't Forget the Teachers": Towards an Educator-Centered Understanding of Harms from Large Language Models in Education

🔗: arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14592
A screenshot of our paper: Title: “Don’t Forget the Teachers”: Towards an Educator-Centered Understanding of Harms from Large Language Models in Education Authors: Emma Harvey, Allison Koenecke, Rene Kizilcec Abstract: Education technologies (edtech) are increasingly incorporating new features built on LLMs, with the goals of enriching the processes of teaching and learning and ultimately improving learning outcomes. However, it is still too early to understand the potential downstream impacts of LLM-based edtech. Prior attempts to map the risks of LLMs have not been tailored to education specifically, even though it is a unique domain in many respects: from its population (students are often children, who can be especially impacted by technology) to its goals (providing the ‘correct’ answer may be less important than understanding how to arrive at an answer) to its implications for higher-order skills that generalize across contexts (e.g. critical thinking and collaboration). We conducted semi-structured interviews with six edtech providers representing leaders in the K-12 space, as well as a diverse group of 23 educators with varying levels of experience with LLM-based edtech. Through a thematic analysis, we explored how each group is anticipating, observing, and accounting for potential harms from LLMs in education. We find that, while edtech providers focus primarily on mitigating technical harms, i.e. those that can be measured based solely on LLM outputs themselves, educators are more concerned about harms that result from the broader impacts of LLMs, i.e. those that require observation of interactions between students, educators, school systems, and edtech to measure. Overall, we (1) develop an education-specific overview of potential harms from LLMs, (2) highlight gaps between conceptions of harm by edtech providers and those by educators, and (3) make recommendations to facilitate the centering of educators in the design and development of edtech tools.
March 13, 2025 at 7:32 PM