Supporting Responsive Mathematics Teaching in Elementary Classrooms Using ChatGPT

This article examines prospective teachers' reported experiences and perceptions as they used a standardized prompt with the free version of ChatGPT (ChatGPT-3.5, OpenAI, 2024) to analyze and respond to elementary students' work on high cognitive demand mathematics tasks. The purpose of this study is to contribute to understanding how AI tools, rather than replacing teacher expertise, might act as pedagogical support to enhance prospective teachers' abilities to analyze and respond to student thinking in ways that maintain cognitive demand and extend mathematical understanding (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2024). Results indicated that prospective teachers perceived that ChatGPT did support their analysis and responses in ways responsive to their students' thinking. Results also demonstrated three distinct types of questions generated by ChatGPT that emerged from the prospective teachers' experiences working with elementary students: advancing, clarifying, and extending. Implications and discussion focus on the potential of using ChatGPT to support specific aspects of responsive teaching.