By Sanjana Gongati (University of Illinois)
Information
Generative artificial intelligence technologies are beginning to transform our lives, including education. Recent studies have found that AI tools can support the development of students' thinking and self-regulated learning (Sardi et al., 2025; Zhou et al., 2024) and their programming self-efficacy and motivation (Yilmaz & Yilmaz, 2023). However, AI tools may also inhibit students’ thinking because it “does everything for you” (Habib et al., 2024, p.4).
We investigated the potential role that AI tools can serve in developing students’ statistical thinking skills for a general introductory level student population. We recruited 5 participants who completed an introductory statistics course and had them complete a task-based interview in which they utilized Rtutor.AI to complete a graphing task.
Several themes emerged from the participant interviews. Three themes – “Building statistical understanding through a step-by-step process”, “Identifying key elements of a problem to create specific prompts”, and “Lowering barriers to completion of statistical tasks” – illustrated how Rtutor.AI helped students break down complex problems, and extract and organize key information. A fourth theme – “Struggles due to a lack of statistical understanding” – also revealed a potential negative repercussion of using the tool; Rtutor.AI may have limited students’ active engagement in statistical decision-making. Finally, a fifth theme – “Prior knowledge and preferences shaping engagement with AI” – suggests a bidirectional relationship between how students thought about the statistical content of the graphs and their use of Rtutor.AI. These results highlight both the potential and the risks of incorporating AI into statistics classrooms.