ChatGPT in lesson preparation - A Teacher Choices Trial
12 December 2024
In December 2023, the Education Endowment Foundation and the Hg Foundation commissioned NFER to undertake this research. The project examined teachers’ use of ChatGPT during lesson and resource planning for KS3 science lessons and the impact on their workload.
259 Year 7 and Year 8 science teachers from 68 schools took part in this school-randomised controlled trial during 2024. The implementation lasted for ten weeks in the summer term. Teachers in the ChatGPT group were asked to use ChatGPT to prepare lessons and resources for upcoming Year 7 and/or 8 science lessons. These teachers were also given access to an online guide to using ChatGPT. Teachers from the non-GenAI group were asked not to use any form of GenAI tool in any lesson and resource preparation for their Year 7 and/or 8 science lessons.
Key Findings
- The lesson and resource preparation time spent by the ChatGPT group was 69% of the time spent by the non-GenAI group in weeks six to ten of the trial. While a typical teacher in the non-GenAI group spent 81.5 minutes per week preparing lessons and resources for Year 7 and Year 8 science lessons, teachers in the ChatGPT group spent around 56.2 minutes per week, saving 25.3 minutes per week on average.
- We found no evidence to suggest that the quality of the lesson resources used by the two groups differed, from an expert panel review (who did not know how the resources had been created) of lesson resources sampled from each of the two groups.
- Teachers used ChatGPT and referred to the ChatGPT guide less frequently as the trial progressed. For the use of the teacher guide, at least, this is likely to be related to moving away from the ‘learning phase’ and into normal practice.
- The time saving for the ChatGPT group occurred even though teachers used ChatGPT to support a relatively modest amount of their overall planning: they tended to use ChatGPT for one or two activities rather than across the lesson: most commonly for creating questions or quizzes, or finding new ideas for activities.
- Teachers reported typically using the time saved to complete other lesson and resource planning (LRP) or teaching tasks, or to reduce overall workload. In the context of high levels of workload for the teaching profession, this appears to be promising for teachers as teachers in our trial were, in most cases, only testing out their allocated approach on part of their timetable.