Potential risks of generative artificial intelligence integration into K-12 education: A scoping review

The rapid integration of Generative AI (GenAI) into K-12 education has outpaced our understanding of its potential risks and unintended consequences. Existing reviews have prioritized higher education and technical promise, overlooking the potential developmental risks it poses to children and adolescents in K-12 settings. This scoping review synthesizes 22 empirical studies from K-12 contexts to map the types of risks and concerns reported in research, compile mitigation strategies, and identify priority gaps that could guide more developmentally informed future studies. Across the included studies, reported risks clustered into three domains: (a) risks to psychological wellbeing, with evidence of emotional disconnection and social isolation; (b) risks to intellectual agency, comprising cognitive dependency, distorted self-assessment, and the erosion of creative authorship; and (c) risks to ecological environments, including limited institutional readiness, unclear governance, equity gaps, and privacy concerns that complicate safe and consistent student engagement with GenAI. Promising mitigation strategies identified include designing tasks that value process over product, using GenAI to generate scaffolding (hints) rather than direct solutions, and embedding tools within critical AI literacy curricula. Ultimately, this review suggests that without intentional, developmentally responsive governance, GenAI risks displacing the productive struggle and authentic expression necessary for learning and identity formation. We conclude that safe integration requires shifting the focus from technical adoption to ecological protection, ensuring that tools function as transparent scaffolds for human cognition rather than opaque substitutes for student agency in the K-12 context.