Actionable companion · Governance, equity and accountability

From evidence to district action: Preschool Teachers’ Intentions to Use GenAI: Extending UTAUT

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. The district actions are proposed applications, not findings or recommendations attributed to the original authors. No additional peer review is asserted.

Evidence and context

Confirm the study population, setting and task before applying its findings to your district.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the linked source license:

Against the backdrop of the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), exploring preschool teachers’ willingness to adopt technology is critical for advancing their educational applications. However, this area remains underexplored. To address this gap, this study draws on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to develop a research model incorporating performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, perceived risks, and tech-savviness. Using a sequential mixed-methods design, we recruited 434 teachers to participate in a GenAI teaching-application workshop, collected 399 valid questionnaires for structural equation modeling, and conducted 15 in-depth interviews. Quantitative results indicate that performance expectancy, social influence, and tech-savviness are positively associated with preschool teachers’ intention to use GenAI, while perceived risk is negatively associated; effort expectancy and facilitating conditions show no significant association. Due to methodological limitations including high inter-construct correlations and potential common method bias, these findings should be viewed as exploratory rather than conclusive. Qualitative interviews support these relationships and provide further explanatory insights. The mixed-methods results offer preliminary hypotheses regarding GenAI adoption among preschool teachers, and future confirmatory research is needed to verify their generalizability, especially in collectivist cultural contexts.

A 90-day district pilot

1. Days 1–15 · Appraise. Have the curriculum lead and a teacher read the methods and limitations. Record the study design, sample, comparator, outcomes and evidence gaps. Define a local question that the study can help inform.
2. Days 16–30 · Design. Convene a teacher, student, family and technology working group. Test one proposed use against a documented privacy, accessibility, bias and human-review checklist before authorizing a pilot. Name an accountable owner and set the baseline, success threshold and budget before implementation.
3. Days 31–60 · Test. Start with a small voluntary cohort, preserve an accessible non-AI route and require teacher review. Use synthetic or de-identified examples; approve data handling and tool terms through district processes.
4. Days 61–90 · Decide. Track unresolved risks, subgroup access, complaint resolution time and the proportion of outputs that require substantive human correction. Compare with baseline, document uncertainty and stop or revise if learning worsens, access is unequal or critical errors persist.

The board decision brief

Report the learning problem, evidence quality, participating population, total cost including review time, measured benefit, errors, access differences and remaining uncertainties. Make a dated recommendation to stop, revise or expand. A positive perception survey alone does not establish learning improvement.

Attribution and reuse

Chenchen Hao; Zeguo Wang; Ping Wang. Preschool Teachers’ Intentions to Use GenAI: Extending UTAUT. Behavioral Sciences (2026-05-22). https://doi.org/10.3390/bs16060840

Companion prepared 2026-10-30. Original authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract is an attributed source extract; the implementation plan is new AI-assisted editorial material, offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license. This guide has not undergone independent peer review.