Artificial intelligence in classroom management: A systematic review on educational purposes, technical implementations, and ethical considerations

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly shaping education, including classroom management. This systematic review analyzes 104 studies (2000–2022) on the use of AI in classroom management, focusing on educational purposes, technical implementations, and ethical considerations. Our findings show a growing use of AI technologies—particularly machine learning and deep learning—for tasks such as attendance tracking, behavior monitoring, and engagement assessment. These tools can streamline classroom management and offer detailed insights into student behavior. However, only a minority of studies leveraged AI’s full potential, such as real-time feedback or multimodal data. Ethical issues, particularly privacy, data security, and algorithmic bias, were often underreported: only 22% of studies addressed ethical concerns, and just 13% implemented privacy-preserving measures. Our review underscores the importance of balancing technological innovation with ethical responsibility. It offers a comprehensive overview of AI’s current applications and highlights future challenges and directions for responsible AI use in classrooms. • Systematic review of 104 AI classroom studies on goals, methods, and ethics. • Most tools focus on student attention, behavior, or engagement tracking. • Only 16% of studies used AI beyond efficiency, e.g., real-time feedback. • Ethical concerns were addressed in just 22% of reviewed studies. • 49% of models used video data directly without explicit feature design.