The Lexington Student Research and Publication Collaborative (LSRPC) is a student-led initiative currently conducting original research on student perspectives of Generative AI usage. Their work highlights how generative AI impacts high school students while comparing its usage to its initial study conducted in 2023.
This April, the LSRPC attended the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference’s Research Engagement and Development with Youth (READY) Program, where members presented their ideas alongside five other student research groups to researchers, doctors, and others in the field of educational research.
“The AERA conference is like a conference for all different types of education researchers. It was qualitative and quantitative,” Aanya Kaveti, LSRPC member and a Lexington High School junior, said.
At the conference, LHS attendees presented their collected data through a poster conference and a full paper presentation, in addition to facilitating two roundtable discussions with experts in the field. With over 15,000 adult researchers in attendance at the conference, LHS students had transformative opportunities to learn about the world of academic research and practice communication skills.
“It was like a grown-up version of a Socratic seminar,” Noe Voskuil, LSRPC member and LHS junior, noted.
One of the most impactful parts of attending the conference was the recognition and respect students received while presenting.
“They [experts] take you seriously. That was the best thing about the conference, that they were talking to us as people interested in research and high schoolers, like this [was] not a high school project; this was like a research project,” Voskuil said.
As for their project itself, these LHS students carry on the curiosity from previous alumni.
“A cohort of [Dr. Muse’s] students in 2023 were working on a project about student usage of ChatGPT, and it just transformed into something that they started working on outside of class,” Kaveti explained.
Current researchers in LSRPC conducted new interviews to be analyzed against the old interviews conducted by past LHS students. They examined student perspectives on AI use and its unique employment in a high school setting. LSRPC’s goal in researching high school AI usage is to ultimately change the discourse around AI and to bridge the gaps between students and teachers that AI has created.
“We want to create more empathy and standardization around AI policy,” Voskuil said.
To achieve their goals, LSRPC addressed possible policies in their paper that could build trust between students and teachers. Their paper also emphasized that students turn to AI not only out of laziness, but also out of other external pressures and valued goals.
“People use AI not because they’re lazy, but because they’re incredibly overwhelmed, and because the pressures that people experience at LHS are crazy,” Voskuil observed.
With AI usage becoming increasingly prevalent in schools and other spaces, LSRPC’s work highlights the mass usage and importance of AI, and how its changing presence continues to impact learning environments.
