Diverging Trajectories: A Five-Year Study of Teachers’ and Students’ Technology Perceptions Across the Arrival of Generative AI

This five-wave survey study (2021–2025), longitudinal at school level and repeated cross-sectional at respondent level, tracked teachers’ and students’ (n = 1355 and 1756 responses, respectively) perceptions of classroom technology in four Australian secondary schools spanning a broad socioeconomic range using the UTAUT constructs as an analytical lens across the period of generative artificial intelligence’s (Gen-AI’s) arrival. Perceptions rose in both groups for three years, then diverged sharply: successive student cohorts continued rising on all four constructs, while teachers reversed, ending below their 2021 baseline on performance expectancy (d = −1.06) and social influence (d = −0.94). Linear mixed-effects models confirmed the wave–group interaction on every construct (all p < 0.001). School means were ordered consistently with socioeconomic advantage (ICSEA) at every wave, while device policy was associated with smaller differences. The reversal coincided with the emergence of Gen-AI as a dominant technology in respondents’ free-text nominations. Because the UTAUT items concern classroom technology in general, this coincidence is an association between two independently measured series. On that basis, I propose that discontinuity is a property of the relation between a technology’s capabilities and a role’s accountable tasks and is, therefore, a question to be asked separately of each school population.