Levels of AI awareness and pedagogical skills among Nigerian teachers: The differentials of gender and teachers’ experience

Synthesis: A stratified random survey of 2,586 secondary school teachers across Nigeria's six geopolitical zones measures AI awareness and AI pedagogical skills separately, and finds the two do not travel together. Awareness sits at a moderate level, pedagogical skill markedly lower — conceptual familiarity without the capacity to enact it in teaching. Male teachers reported small advantages on both, and teaching experience did not predict awareness but did predict skill, with early- and mid-career teachers ahead of experienced colleagues. It is one of the largest empirical samples on teacher AI Literacy readiness from Sub-Saharan Africa, and it points to structured, pedagogically grounded professional development rather than tool exposure.

Key Findings

1. Teachers reported moderate AI awareness (M = 3.13, SD = 1.79 on an 8-item binary scale) but substantially lower AI pedagogical skills (M = 2.47, SD = 0.86 on a 1-5 scale), a gap the authors read as familiarity without application.
2. Gender differences were statistically significant but small: male teachers reported higher awareness (d = 0.17) and higher pedagogical skills (d = 0.31).
3. Teaching experience did not significantly predict AI awareness, but early-career and mid-career teachers reported significantly higher AI pedagogical skills than experienced teachers (η² = 0.008).
4. AI awareness and AI pedagogical skills correlated moderately and positively (r = .378, p < .001), so the two are related but far from interchangeable.
5. The patterns held after controlling for school type, and the authors place Nigerian secondary teachers at an early-to-intermediate phase of AI integration.
6. Data came from 2,586 teachers drawn by stratified random sampling across Nigeria's six geopolitical zones, analyzed with t-tests, one-way ANOVA, correlation and ANCOVA.

How the study was built

The sample is 2,586 secondary school teachers selected by stratified random sampling across Nigeria's six geopolitical zones, which makes this one of the larger teacher-readiness datasets in the Global South literature. The two constructs are measured with different instruments. AI awareness uses an eight-item binary scale, so its maximum score is eight and a mean of 3.13 places the typical teacher around the middle. AI pedagogical skills use the 20-item Educators' AI Literacy scale, reported with a Cronbach's alpha of .977, on a 1-5 scale.

Analysis is conventional and appropriate for the design: descriptive statistics, independent-samples t-tests for gender, one-way ANOVA for experience bands, correlation between the two constructs, and ANCOVA to hold school type constant. Keeping awareness and skill as separate outcomes is the study's key methodological choice, since a single composite would have hidden the gap it reports.

Awareness runs ahead of pedagogical skill

The headline is the divergence. Teachers are moderately aware of AI but report much lower capacity to use it pedagogically, and the two measures correlate only moderately (r = .378). Awareness on its own is therefore a poor proxy for readiness: a teacher can know what generative AI is without being able to design a lesson, prompt or assessment around it.

The practical reading is that professional development focused on explaining AI will not close this gap, because the gap is not informational. What the authors recommend is structured, equity-sensitive and pedagogically grounded training — the kind that builds enactment, not just vocabulary.

Gender and experience differentials

The subgroup results are small but consistent. Male teachers reported slightly higher awareness (d = 0.17) and higher pedagogical skills (d = 0.31), and the authors treat these as modest differences rather than a decisive divide. More interesting is the experience pattern: experience did not predict awareness at all, but it did predict skill, and the direction runs the other way — early- and mid-career teachers reported higher pedagogical skills than experienced teachers (η² = 0.008). The effect size is small, so it is a signal to investigate rather than a settled conclusion, but it fits the broader pattern in which newer cohorts arrive with more hands-on exposure to AI tools.

What this means for practice

• Instructors. Do not assume that colleagues who can describe generative AI can also teach with it. The study separates awareness from pedagogical skill, so self-assessed familiarity is a poor guide to who needs support with lesson design.
• Faculty developers. Build training around enactment rather than explanation. Since awareness ran well ahead of skill and experience did not close the gap, a program of tool demonstrations will leave the reported deficit in place; design for planning, prompting and assessment tasks instead.
• Policymakers and administrators. Target professional development at the awareness-skill gap and watch for the subgroup pattern. Small gender differences and a skill advantage among early-career teachers suggest provision should be differentiated rather than uniform.
• Researchers. Treat the awareness-skill distinction as the default measurement choice. A single readiness score would have concealed the central finding here, and replication across other Sub-Saharan systems would test whether the gap is regional or general.

Limitations

• The design is cross-sectional and self-reported, so awareness and pedagogical skill are what teachers report about themselves rather than observed classroom practice.
• The instruments differ in scale and format — an 8-item binary awareness scale against a 20-item 1-5 skills scale — so the size of the gap between them is partly a measurement artifact the authors do not fully resolve.
• Gender and experience effects are statistically significant but small (d = 0.17 and 0.31; η² = 0.008), and the authors present them as patterns to examine rather than firm differences.
• The sample is secondary school teachers in one national system, so generalization to other levels, systems or teacher populations is untested.

Citation

Olurinola, O. D., Akintola, O. A., & Olugbade, D. (2026). Levels of AI awareness and pedagogical skills among Nigerian teachers: The differentials of gender and teachers’ experience. Computers and Education Open, 11, 100401.