Over the course of 2025, increasingly more U.S. students from middle school through college used artificial intelligence (AI) to help with homework. Most of these students (60 percent) also expressed concern about using AI for school-related purposes. Based on results from a survey of 1,214 youth, this report offers insights and recommendations to help schools guide students in using AI to support — not replace — their learning.

More Students Use AI for Homework, and More Believe It Harms Critical Thinking

Selected Findings from the American Youth Panel

Heather L. Schwartz, Melissa Kay Diliberti

ResearchPublished Mar 17, 2026

In nationally representative surveys of American youth, increasing shares of middle schoolers, high schoolers, and college students reported using artificial intelligence (AI) for help with their homework over the course of 2025. At the same time, these students reported substantial ambiguity in how to navigate their growing use of AI in the school environment. That most students who use AI worry about its impacts should be a call to action for educators.

To help school principals, school district superintendents, and state department of education leaders create or revise their guidance for students' allowed use of AI for schoolwork, the authors fielded their most comprehensive set of questions to date about students' AI use to learn how and why youth are using AI for school-related purposes.

This report presents selected findings from 1,214 youth between the ages of 12 and 29 who completed the December 2025 survey of the RAND American Youth Panel. Trends over time for some questions reoccurring from earlier surveys (February 2025 and May 2025) are also shown, as well as results by grade level and gender.

Drawing from this analysis, the authors recommend ways in which schools can help ensure that students' AI use enhances their learning process instead of replacing it.

Key Findings

  • The share of students in middle school grades and up who reported using AI for help with their homework increased from 48 percent in May 2025 to 62 percent in December 2025. Use among middle and high schoolers drove the overall increase.
  • As of December 2025, 67 percent of students endorsed the statement "The more students use AI for their schoolwork, the more it will harm their critical thinking skills" — up more than 10 percentage points from ten months earlier.
  • With the exception of using AI to get answers for homework, most students did not feel that their use of AI for other school-related purposes constituted cheating.
  • Students in higher grade levels were more likely than students in lower grade levels to (1) say that their schools' rules for AI use depended on the specific teacher, (2) believe that their teachers were checking students' homework for AI use, and (3) worry about being accused of using AI to cheat.
  • More female than male students believed that AI use harms their critical thinking skills and thought that their teachers were checking homework for AI use.

Recommendations

  • Schools should have direct conversations with students about their perceptions of AI use and how it might assist or hamper the development of their critical thinking skills.
  • Educators should elicit students' suggestions for ways to most and least productively use AI for homework help.
  • To develop school policies and guidance about AI use, school educators and district leaders should identify use cases in which AI use primarily leads to cognitive offloading (i.e., using AI to do the mental work for students) or to cognitive augmentation (i.e., using AI to spur students to do deeper or more-robust work).
  • In practice, using AI for cognitive augmentation rather than cognitive offloading might require schools to adopt the flipped classroom model, in which students are first exposed to new content at home (whether AI-assisted or not) and then do independent or group practice with that new content during teacher-led class time that is AI-free.
  • Regardless of which instructional model schools use, school principals and district leaders need to explicitly tell students when and for which purposes they may use AI and when they cannot.
  • Clarity and schoolwide consistency in what is allowed (especially for homework) could at least help alleviate students' worry that using AI will harm their critical thinking skills. And for schools trying to limit students' use of AI for homework, a schoolwide policy explicitly forbidding it could at least dampen students' use of AI for this purpose, even if it cannot stop it completely.

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Schwartz, Heather L. and Melissa Kay Diliberti, More Students Use AI for Homework, and More Believe It Harms Critical Thinking: Selected Findings from the American Youth Panel. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2026. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4742-1.html.
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