How Gemini is helping students and teachers in the classroom

New studies from the UK and Italy show how Gemini can boost student learning and help teachers facilitate more active learning in the classroom.

Technology best serves education when it creates space for inspiring teaching and deeper learning. To better understand how AI tools perform in everyday educational settings, we’ve spent the past year working alongside educators and researchers in classrooms across the UK and Italy.

From testing one-on-one AI math tutoring to analyzing thousands of hours of classroom collaboration, today we’re sharing new research findings that demonstrate the impact of this technology on the process of teaching and learning. Together, the results show that AI tutoring using Gemini capabilities can deliver support on par with human tutors for UK students when used responsibly with human oversight, while Gemini itself can foster more collaborative classrooms and support teacher wellbeing in Italy.

UK: Scaling reliable, effective math tutoring

To truly understand how student learning is being shaped, we need to study it over time across diverse classroom settings. We previously ran an exploratory study with Eedi, which found that AI tutoring could operate effectively in real classrooms. The study tested an AI tutor combining Gemini capabilities with Eedi's study platform, designed to identify a student’s specific mistake and guide them to fix it themselves.

This year, we set out to better understand Gemini's pedagogical capabilities and the nuances of student learning in structured mathematics lessons. We conducted a 10-week randomized controlled trial (RCT) with over 1,100 students (ages 12-15) in the UK to measure their learning gains in math through sessions on Eedi’s school platform. Educators were actively involved at every stage of the study — with teachers monitoring student progress and providing hands-on support in the classroom, and tutors guiding students one-on-one through the platform.

Whenever a student answered a question incorrectly, they received one of three types of support: a static hint, help from a human tutor, or interactive AI tutoring combining Eedi’s pedagogical resources with Gemini. To ensure teaching quality, human experts reviewed every AI response in real time before it reached a student. While test scores aren’t the only measure of learning outcomes, over the course of the trial, we tracked their progress across regular assignments in the Eedi platform, intermediate quizzes, and independent STAR standardized tests.

This trial revealed major leaps in model quality and student performance. Compared to last year’s study, Gemini’s pedagogical quality improved by nearly 25%, increasing the outright approval rate by expert reviewers from 76% to 95%. Across in-platform tasks and intermediate quizzes, students receiving AI tutoring performed similarly to those paired with human tutors. Just as importantly, AI tutoring promoted active thinking rather than shortcuts: following a pedagogical prompt we provided, Gemini guided students instead of handing them answers in nearly 99% of sessions, and students worked through the math themselves in more than 85% of their chats.

While the use of AI tutoring led to clear gains on daily classroom tasks and quizzes, these gains didn’t show up on STAR standardized test scores over the same trial period. After exploring more, we believe this can be attributed to step-by-step tutoring taking more time per question than using simple hints. Students in the trial therefore solved fewer total problems per session (averaging about 14 with AI tutoring versus 19 with static hints). Over 10 weeks, that lower volume meant students covered less overall curriculum material—even as their pacing and understanding improved—indicating the trial length wasn't long enough to cover the broad range of topics on the STAR test. To examine this trend further, we are exploring follow-up trials across a full academic year while also expanding our metrics to better understand what drives meaningful learning and eventual outcomes.

You can find more details in our full technical report.

Italy: Creating a more active classroom

Following our initial pilot in Northern Italy, we worked with the Salesians of Don Bosco school network and the Pontifical Salesian University in Rome on a yearlong study across 31 schools. Together, we learned from Primary, Secondary and Vocational educators across 1,600 teachers (representing over 24,500 students ages 13-18) by collecting classroom activities and self reports on lesson planning both with and without Gemini for Education to understand how AI supports classroom dynamics, student engagement, and teacher wellbeing.

The findings show that AI is most effective when educators remain at the center of the classroom and learning. When educators used Gemini to co-design lessons, they reported feeling more creative than usual in their teaching and planning (79% with Gemini vs. 30% without Gemini) — a shift that helped transform classroom dynamics. Traditional front of the classroom lectures dropped by 38%, making way for workshops, group activities and peer discussions that nearly tripled student-led collaborative learning. In turn, students responded positively to the collaborative environment and active lessons created by their teachers. In lessons teachers co-designed with Gemini, more students actively participated in class (with student reported engagement rising from 77% to 84%) while debating diverse viewpoints more often and taking greater ownership of their learning.

Beyond improving classroom dynamics, the study showed a meaningful impact on teacher wellbeing. Educators often carry the heavy burden of relying solely on their own energy to keep a room engaged but in lessons co-planned with Gemini, that reliance dropped by 66%. Instead, lessons where the activity design itself drove engagement more than doubled (from 23.2% to 52.2%), carrying the momentum of the class and relieving some of that daily pressure of keeping students engaged.

Even on days with tight prep time, having AI as a thought partner to adapt materials gave educators the support they needed to focus on what matters most: mentoring and connecting with their students. More details about the implementation and study can be found in the Don Bosco CNOS-FAP Foundation implementation report.

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/education/impact-studies-uk-italy