Teachers' AI literacy found crucial in enhancing student creativity

The study confirms that the use of AI in teaching significantly and positively affects students’ creativity. AI technologies such as intelligent tutoring systems, personalized feedback mechanisms, and AI-generated content allow teachers to offload repetitive tasks and redirect their efforts toward more innovative instructional practices

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence continues to reshape education globally, offering transformative opportunities alongside critical challenges. A new study titled "The Usage of AI in Teaching and Students’ Creativity: The Mediating Role of Learning Engagement and the Moderating Role of AI Literacy," published in Behavioral Sciences, explores how integrating AI into teaching environments influences students' creative capacities. Conducted by researchers Min Zhou and Song Peng at Sichuan University, the study uses conservation of resources theory to frame a comprehensive investigation into how AI usage, student engagement, and teacher AI literacy interact to impact educational outcomes.

The study highlights that while AI presents substantial opportunities to foster creativity, the relationship is far from automatic. Instead, it is deeply mediated by students' learning engagement and moderated by their perceptions of their teachers’ AI literacy. Through a rigorous structural equation modeling approach using data from 432 university students, the study lays out a detailed, empirically grounded framework for understanding how AI technologies must be purposefully integrated to genuinely enhance creativity.

How does the usage of AI in teaching impact students’ creativity?

The study confirms that the use of AI in teaching significantly and positively affects students’ creativity. AI technologies such as intelligent tutoring systems, personalized feedback mechanisms, and AI-generated content allow teachers to offload repetitive tasks and redirect their efforts toward more innovative instructional practices. Teachers who use AI can create learning environments rich in resources, personalization, and cognitive stimulation, thereby giving students the tools and opportunities to engage deeply with material and develop novel ideas.

AI empowers teachers to design open-ended learning activities, pose complex problem-solving tasks, and provide adaptive feedback based on individual learning profiles. These factors collectively enhance students’ thinking skills and creative problem-solving abilities. However, the study also warns that over-reliance on AI tools without encouraging critical thinking could foster dependence on automated solutions, undermining the development of autonomous, reflective learners. Thus, while AI integration creates fertile ground for creativity, careful pedagogical strategies are necessary to avoid the pitfalls of passive learning and ensure that students actively participate in constructing knowledge and ideas.

The research also outlines a positive feedback loop: as students produce creative outputs through AI-assisted learning, they simultaneously enhance teachers' confidence and motivation to further innovate in their teaching methods. This cyclical process supports an ongoing evolution of more creativity-driven, AI-enhanced educational models.

What role does learning engagement play in the relationship between AI usage and creativity?

The study identifies learning engagement as a crucial mediator between AI usage and student creativity. Simply deploying AI technologies is not enough; their effectiveness depends heavily on whether they stimulate students’ active, emotional, and cognitive investment in the learning process.

Learning engagement, conceptualized across behavioral, emotional, and cognitive dimensions, reflects the energy and resources students commit to educational tasks. When teachers leverage AI tools effectively, such as using adaptive learning platforms that offer tailored challenges or VR-based immersive simulations, students are more likely to exhibit sustained attention, curiosity, and a willingness to explore. This heightened engagement, in turn, fosters the development of creativity by encouraging deeper thinking, independent exploration, and the generation of original ideas.

The results demonstrate that AI-powered environments offering personalized support, dynamic feedback, and interactive learning experiences greatly enhance learning engagement, which directly translates into higher levels of creativity among students. Conversely, low engagement environments, even when technologically sophisticated, are less likely to nurture creative thinking.

The mediation analysis, employing bootstrap sampling methods, confirmed that learning engagement significantly explains the pathway from AI usage to enhanced creativity. Students in environments where AI tools were integrated with a clear focus on promoting active involvement showed stronger creative outcomes than those in environments characterized by passive, teacher-centered uses of AI.

How does AI literacy moderate the effects of AI usage on learning engagement and creativity?

Another critical finding of the study is that students’ perceptions of their teachers' AI literacy significantly moderate the relationship between AI usage and learning engagement. In classrooms where students perceived their teachers as highly AI-literate, meaning teachers could skillfully select, integrate, and ethically use AI technologies, students reported higher engagement and, subsequently, greater creativity.

Teachers perceived as proficient in AI were able to seamlessly integrate digital tools into pedagogy, reducing cognitive barriers, increasing classroom interactivity, and offering more meaningful, context-sensitive feedback. This facilitated a more enriching learning environment that encouraged students to invest effort, explore ideas, and produce creative work. In contrast, when students perceived teachers as lacking AI literacy, the integration of AI often appeared disjointed or ineffective, leading to frustration, disengagement, and missed opportunities for creativity development.

Interestingly, the study also finds that the strength of the mediating role of learning engagement diminishes when AI literacy is perceived to be low. In such cases, even if AI technologies are present, their impact on engagement and creativity is significantly weakened. This points to the necessity of prioritizing AI literacy training for educators, not merely as a technical competency but as a critical pedagogical resource that profoundly influences educational outcomes.

For AI to fulfill its transformative promise in education, investments must extend beyond hardware and software. They must focus equally on human capital, specifically, equipping teachers with the knowledge, skills, and ethical frameworks necessary to integrate AI meaningfully into student-centered learning processes.