New NCTM Statement on Math, AI Relevant for Educators

David Barnes, NCTM Associate Executive Director

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) has released the position statement Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics Teaching. The statement highlights potential benefits of AI-driven tools, including responding to students’ thinking and interests in ways previous tools could not. The position also emphasizes the need for teachers to remain skeptical of AI results and to be involved in the development and testing of AI tools in math and statistics education.

For statistics and data science teachers of middle and high school students, this position statement is particularly relevant. AI tools have the potential to excel at recognizing and solving computational problems, but they are only as good as the training input they receive. Conscious or unconscious bias may influence the choice of training data, increasing the need to engage students in being aware of this challenge, questioning, and interrogating tools to identify potential bias and associated challenges.

Mathematics educators—and statistics and data science teachers specifically—must be involved in developing and testing AI tools in education and developing strategies for using the tool to increase student sense-making, questioning, and application. The focus should not be on AI as a tool to generate a specific number, but a tool to further the purposeful use of statistics and data science to make sense of contexts and the world around us and to develop the understanding, skills, and practices needed to increase student opportunities.

Editor’s Note: The AI system Copilot was used in the development of this article.