Teachers’ Attitudes, Actions, and Outcomes in the Generative AI Era

The rapid integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) into educational contexts has placed teachers at the forefront of a profound pedagogical transformation. While GenAI tools offer unprecedented opportunities for personalized instruction, automated feedback, and administrative efficiency, educational research remains fragmented in its understanding of teacher engagement with these technologies. A critical challenge lies in unpacking the psychological and behavioral mechanisms that shape teachers‘ cognitive and affective responses to GenAI, their actual instructional actions, and the resulting educational outcomes.Preliminary evidence indicates that teachers’ psychological constructs, such as technological anxiety, self-efficacy, professional identity, and emotional labor, serve as critical determinants of whether GenAI is adopted and whether it delivers its potential educational benefits. Systematically examining the sequential links between these psychological constructs and teachers’ attitudes towards GenAI, their instructional actions, and measurable professional outcomes through educational and organizational psychology lenses is essential. Such efforts are needed to build evidence-based teacher training programs, inform institutional policies, and develop psychologically grounded frameworks for AI-enhanced teaching.This Research Topic aims to gather contributions that advance our understanding of the dynamic interplay among teachers’ psychological constructs, their attitudes toward GenAI, their instructional actions, and the resulting outcomes for both teachers and students. We particularly welcome studies grounded in educational psychology or organizational psychology perspectives examining psychological and behavioral dimensions such as techno-anxiety, self-efficacy, professional identity, job burnout, and emotional labor in the GenAI era in different cultural contexts, while excluding manuscripts focusing purely on technical development or tool evaluation. Experimental, correlational, longitudinal, and mixed-methods studies across pre-service and in-service K-12 and higher education teachers are all welcomed.Topics of interest include:- The cognitive, affective, and motivational dimensions of teachers‘ attitudes toward GenAI, including trust, risk perception, value-beliefs, technophobia, and crisis awareness- Psychological antecedents shaping teachers’ GenAI attitudes: AI self-efficacy, technostress, occupational burnout, professional identity, emotional labor, perceived utility and ethical risk- Bidirectional relations between teacher psychological dispositions and actionable GenAI classroom practices- How teachers’ AI adoption behaviors mediate the link between psychological states and student academic, affective outcomes as well as teachers’ long-term occupational well-being- Institutional, cultural, and training factors moderating attitude-behavior-outcome chains among educators from educational/organizational psychology perspectives- Psychology-driven professional development interventions that alleviate teacher AI anxiety and foster sustainable, ethical GenAI practice- Cross-group comparisons of psychological response patterns: pre-service vs. veteran teachers, different disciplines, cross-cultural educator cohortsBy integrating educational psychology and organizational psychology perspectives, this collection advances a unified psychological model for supporting teacher adaptation in the generative AI educational landscape. Topic editors: JIA ZHANG, Xin ZHENG, Chong Ho Yu Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/84343/teachers-attitudes-actions-and-outcomes-in-the-generative-ai-era