ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1604414
This article is part of the Research TopicAI Innovations in Education: Adaptive Learning and BeyondView all 20 articles
Evaluating the use of AI in the design of learning situations by university students of early childhood education
Provisionally accepted
- Camilo José Cela University, Madrid, Spain
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The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education (HE) is an expanding reality, exerting an increasingly significant influence on teaching and learning processes. Its integration into the university environment is reshaping how instructors design and deliver their courses while providing students with new opportunities to personalize their learning experiences. Not only does AI enable task automation and resource optimization, but it also presents methodological, technological, and ethical challenges that warrant thorough investigation. In this context, we assessed the academic performance of 238 students enrolled in an undergraduate degree program for early years education teachers, defining performance as their ability to design learning situations aimed at promoting mathematical thinking in young children. Our analysis distinguished between those who used AI to complete the task and those who relied on traditional teaching resources. To this end, we adopted a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. In the quantitative phase, we employed a quasi-experimental post-test only design with experimental and control groups. In the qualitative phase, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the learning materials produced by the students in the experimental group with the support of AI. The findings indicate that the application of AI brought about significant changes in the teachinglearning process. The experimental group obtained better academic results than the control group. These results underscore, on one hand, the transformative potential of AI to improve pedagogical practices, and on the other, the need for research to examine its long-term effects on student learning, teacher engagement and ethical use, and the development of HE curricula that include AI as a teaching resource.
Keywords: Artificial intelligence (AI), Higher education (HE), mathematics education, academic performance, Pedagogical innovation
Received: 01 Apr 2025; Accepted: 02 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ester, Caballero-García, Morales and Cañadas. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Pilar Ester, Camilo José Cela University, Madrid, Spain
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