Should Kids Use AI for Homework? What 1,017 Teens Told Researchers
Kids can use AI for homework, but only in a way that makes them do the thinking. A 2026 survey of American teens found that most use AI for schoolwork, that a sizeable minority paste what it gives them without changing it, and a classroom trial in Turkey showed why the difference matters.
How many teens use AI for homework? Seven in ten. In a 2026 Common Sense Media survey run by NORC at the University of Chicago, 70% of 1,017 U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 said they use AI tools for schoolwork.
The more useful numbers are about how. Among teens who use AI for schoolwork, 63% say they get an answer from it, but that group splits: 35% improve the answer using what they know, 31% rewrite it, and 25% use it as-is. And 77% of users also use AI without getting direct answers, for example to brainstorm a start (45%) or check a finished answer (43%).
When stuck, 65% of all teens say they first try on their own or ask someone, and only 10% reach for an AI tool first. The authors warn against simply blaming teens, noting that only 44% say a teacher has ever discussed when to use AI and when not to.
What does it look like at home? My own kids did this all last year. Here in Saudi Arabia, there's literally a website where all the answers to the textbook exercises are available. The kids just open it and copy the answers. They don't even know what the question is. When the teacher assigns something out of the textbook, that's when they go to AI, drop everything in and copy the output. I don't even know if they're reading what they're copying.
I don't think the answer is to eliminate AI. That's futile. The survey backs the practical point: among teens who use AI for schoolwork, 44% had a tool blocked on a school network or device, and 59% of those got around it on a personal device. Our school systems haven't kept up, and what we really need is for AI to become part of the learning process rather than just the answer machine.
Does AI hurt learning? It can, depending on how it's built. In a 2025 PNAS field experiment, nearly 1,000 high-school students in Turkey practiced math with textbooks only, with a plain ChatGPT-style assistant, or with a tutor-style one given teacher-written solutions and told not to give direct answers.
Both helped during practice (the tutor-style one more). Then came the exam, with no AI allowed. Students who had practiced with the plain assistant scored 17% worse than students who never had AI. Students who had practiced with the tutor-style assistant scored about the same as the no-AI group. So the guardrails didn't make students smarter on the exam, but they avoided the harm.
What don't these studies show? Quite a lot. The survey covers American teens, in English, and relies on self-reporting; its margin of error is 4.3 percentage points, and about a third of the sample (335 of 1,017) came from an opt-in panel. The Turkish trial was one school and one subject (math), run in 2023-24 when the tools were new. Neither study looked at Arabic-medium schools, younger children or Gulf classrooms. Treat them as a map of the problem, not a verdict.
What should a parent look for in an AI homework helper? Three things, all checkable in five minutes:
Does it ask before it tells? Does it go at your child's pace? Re-explaining differently, as many times as it takes, is the point. Can you see what happened? (Look for progress you can check, not just a finished worksheet.) Where does Hakawi fit? Hakawi is an AI tutor for Arabic-medium homework, built around all three checks. A student photographs the page due tomorrow (or picks it from the textbook library), hears it read aloud line by line with an English translation, and then gets quizzed. If an answer is wrong, Hakawi replies with a guiding question first and doesn't just hand over the answer. Parents get a dashboard showing each child's progress by topic, so you can see what's actually been worked on. You can read the full loop on how it works, or see who it's for.
It has limits. It can't stop a child from opening an answers website in another tab. It's an AI and can make mistakes, so it works best alongside a class and a teacher. And it focuses on reading and understanding, then writing; it does very little for spoken Arabic. Hakawi is invite-only for now: request an invite.
Sources Zimmermann, L., Mann, S., Radesky, J., & Robb, M. B. (2026). Teens in the AI Era: Schoolwork and Skills That Matter. Common Sense Media. Data collection by NORC at the University of Chicago. Bastani, H., Bastani, O., Sungu, A., Ge, H., Kabakcı, Ö., & Mariman, R. (2025). Generative AI without guardrails can harm learning: Evidence from high school mathematics. PNAS, 122(26).