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Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant classroom issue. New national teacher polling points to a much more immediate challenge: roughly four in 10 responding Canadian Grades 6–12 teachers believe more than half of their students are using AI to complete homework, while 83.6% report weaker critical-thinking skills than they observed five years ago. The findings also reveal concern about writing, analysis and a growing mismatch between work completed at home and what some students can produce independently in class. Yet the numbers require careful interpretation. They capture educators’ perceptions rather than proving that AI caused the reported decline. Taken alongside other Canadian and international research, however, they raise a difficult question for schools: how can students gain the benefits of AI without allowing convenience to replace the thinking that assignments are supposed to develop?
AI Has Moved From Novelty to an Everyday Homework Tool
Four in 10 Surveyed Canadian Teachers Say Most Students Use AI for Homework; 84% Report Weaker Critical Thinking
The most striking finding is not simply that students are experimenting with AI, but how widespread teachers believe that use has become. The Fraser Institute reported that four in 10 responding Grades 6–12 teachers believe more than half of their students use AI to complete homework. Among students whom teachers believe are using AI for homework, educators estimated that 55.9% are using it inappropriately — essentially allowing the technology to do work for them rather than using it as assistance. That distinction matters. Asking a chatbot to explain an unfamiliar concept, suggest questions for further research or critique a draft can still require substantial student thought. Asking it to generate the finished response can remove much of the intellectual work altogether. For a teacher, those two uses may produce similarly polished documents on the surface, even though the learning behind them is very different.
Other Canadian findings suggest the underlying adoption trend is real, even though different research projects measure different age groups and types of AI use. Actua reported in 2025 that more than 90% of Canadians aged 12 to 18 in its research had used AI in some capacity, either for schoolwork or personal activities. Among those youth, 47% said they used AI-generated text for schoolwork all the time or often. KPMG’s 2025 research, which included high-school and postsecondary students, found 73% were using generative AI for schoolwork, up from 59% a year earlier and 52% in 2023. Those numbers are not directly comparable with the teacher findings because the samples and questions differ, but together they show why educators increasingly treat AI as a normal part of students’ academic environment rather than an occasional novelty. The challenge is shifting from whether students will use AI to what kinds of use actually support learning.
The Homework–Classroom Gap Is Becoming Harder for Teachers to Ignore
A second finding gets closer to the daily experience of marking student work. More than three-quarters, or 78.6%, of responding teachers said some students produce lower-quality work in class than they submit as take-home work. Among the teachers noticing that difference, 90.9% said the gap has been increasing over time. Ontario recorded the highest share of responding teachers reporting lower-quality classroom work than homework, at 88.2%, followed by Alberta at 84.6%, British Columbia at 78.6% and Atlantic Canada at 75.9%. Those figures do not establish that AI created every discrepancy. Students have always had more time, reference material and outside assistance when completing work at home. Generative AI, however, adds a new source of help capable of producing complete paragraphs, explanations and revisions within seconds.
That creates an assessment problem extending well beyond traditional concerns about cheating. Imagine a student handing in a carefully structured take-home essay with strong vocabulary and well-developed arguments, then struggling the next day to explain the same argument in a short classroom response. A teacher must determine whether the difference reflects normal performance pressure, extensive legitimate editing, tutoring, family assistance or reliance on an AI system. The OECD’s 2026 Digital Education Outlook describes essentially the same broader problem: access to general-purpose generative AI can improve the quality of a completed task without necessarily producing equivalent learning gains. In some research reviewed by the OECD, performance advantages disappeared or even reversed when students later had to demonstrate their abilities without AI assistance. That helps explain why educators are increasingly interested in seeing the learning process itself — outlines, drafts, source evaluation, classroom discussion and oral explanation — rather than judging understanding solely from a polished final submission.
The Critical-Thinking Warning Is Serious — but It Is Not Proof That AI Caused the Decline
The most concerning number in the Canadian teacher findings is 83.6%, rounded to 84%, representing the share of responding teachers who said students’ critical-thinking abilities had worsened compared with students five years earlier. Another 72.9% said in-class writing and analytical skills had deteriorated during that period. Those perceptions line up with concerns coming directly from students elsewhere in Canada. KPMG found in 2025 that 48% of student generative-AI users said their critical-thinking skills had deteriorated since they began using the technology, while 66% said they did not believe they were learning or retaining as much knowledge despite using AI. At the same time, 71% said their grades had improved. That combination — stronger output alongside weaker perceived learning — captures one of the central tensions surrounding generative AI in education.
It would nevertheless be inaccurate to read the teacher numbers as evidence that AI alone caused an 84% decline in critical thinking. Teachers were reporting perceptions of change, not results from a controlled experiment measuring individual students before and after AI adoption. The five-year comparison also reaches back before ChatGPT’s public launch in November 2022, making it especially important not to attribute every change during that period to generative AI. Research increasingly suggests that outcomes depend heavily on how the technology is used. The OECD concluded that outsourcing cognitive work to general-purpose chatbots can reduce metacognitive engagement, yet AI designed around clear teaching strategies can improve learning. A 2026 systematic review in Thinking Skills and Creativity likewise found potential benefits for analytical and reasoning skills when ChatGPT is deliberately integrated with appropriate instructional support. Brookings reached a similarly nuanced conclusion after examining more than 400 studies and consulting more than 500 people across 50 countries: AI can help or hinder student development, with overreliance posing the greater danger.
Schools Are Being Forced to Redesign Learning Faster Than Policies Can Keep Up
The teacher concerns arrive while many Canadian educators are still working without consistent AI training or rules. A separate Fraser Institute study released in June 2026, also using Leger polling of Canadian Grades 6–12 teachers, found that 64.7% said their school or school board had not provided training on identifying student AI use. Another 63.6% reported no training on teaching students to use AI appropriately. Only 42.3% said their school had a policy governing student AI use, while just 34.8% reported a policy covering staff use. That research involved 756 teachers and used a hybrid, non-probability data-collection method, with responses weighted by age, gender and region. The methodology means the findings are valuable as a national snapshot of teacher experience, but they should not be treated like a randomly sampled census of every Canadian educator.
Canadian education authorities are already acknowledging the problem. Provincial and territorial ministers discussed AI’s impact on education at the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada meeting in June 2026, emphasizing ethical, responsible and inclusive approaches. British Columbia has developed K–12 guidance that stresses authentic assessment, teacher oversight and AI as a support rather than a replacement for classroom learning. International organizations are moving in much the same direction. UNESCO calls for human-centred, age-appropriate use and stronger AI literacy, while the OECD recommends protecting independent thinking and foundational skills before asking students to work extensively with general-purpose AI. The emerging response, therefore, is more sophisticated than simply banning chatbots. Schools may increasingly require students to defend ideas orally, produce parts of assignments in class, document their research process, critique AI-generated answers and explain where AI assistance was used. The goal is not to pretend the technology can disappear. It is to make sure the student’s thinking remains visible.
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