Mind the Trust Gap: Identifying (Mis)alignments in Teacher-Student Views Toward Control and Agency in K-12 Classroom AI

Tomohiro Nagashima, Lisa Siegrist, Niklas Scholz, Shintaro Sato, Martina Vincoli, Man Su (2026)

As AI technologies enter K 12 classrooms, understanding how different stakeholders perceive these tools is critical. This paper identifies a significant trust gap between Teacher Role and Student Experience perspectives on control and agency in classroom AI systems. Students generally desire greater autonomy and flexibility when interacting with AI tools, while teachers prioritize oversight, monitoring, and structured control to maintain pedagogical alignment. These misalignments have direct implications for AI Literacy programs that must address both stakeholder perspectives to build effective Student Experience in learning environments.

Key Findings

The researchers conducted a speed-dating study using storyboards with 16 school students and 15 school teachers in Germany to investigate alignments and misalignments in views on student-AI decision-making control in K-12 classrooms.

Through explicit pair-matching analysis, they found that students and teachers had misaligned views on several key topics, including how much they trust AI and the social and emotional aspects of student learning with AI.

Students emphasized the importance of their own decision making and of human teachers as gatekeepers of the classroom, arguing that teachers have a "better connection" to students and understand them as whole persons, not just through information detected by systems.

Teachers also reported not fully trusting AI's decision making, citing the risk of incorrect assessment of students (e.g., assigning tasks that do not match actual knowledge levels), and stressed the importance of being able to intervene and override AI's automatic assignments.

Contrary to students' preference for human teachers, many teachers worried that students would trust AI more than teachers themselves — the mirror image of the students' stated view.

Study Design & Method

The speed-dating study paired participants with a series of storyboard scenarios depicting classroom AI systems, eliciting rapid, repeated judgments across design situations. The pair-matching analysis then explicitly compared teacher and student responses on shared topics, revealing where views aligned and where they diverged. The design foregrounds the classroom as a multi-stakeholder environment in which the same technology is perceived differently depending on role.

Implications for AI in Education

The misalignments identified in this study complicate the common assumption that more AI personalization is uniformly desirable. Because students and teachers differ on trust, control, and the social-emotional dimensions of learning with AI, classroom AI design must negotiate competing preferences rather than optimize for a single user. The findings also highlight that teacher-student relationships outside of AI use shape how both groups view the technology, suggesting that trust-building and communication — not just interface design — are needed to fill the perspective gap. This connects to Human In The Loop AI and to the design of Intelligent Tutoring systems in K 12 settings.

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Citation

Tomohiro Nagashima, Lisa Siegrist, Niklas Scholz, Shintaro Sato, Martina Vincoli, Man Su (2026). Mind the Trust Gap: Identifying (Mis)alignments in Teacher-Student Views Toward Control and Agency in K-12 Classroom AI. arXiv:2607.01506.