AI Mastery May Not Be For Everyone, But AI Literacy Should Be

Abstract

Despite the abundance of advice from policy bodies, professional associations, advocacy groups, and scholars on how K-12 schools should assimilate AI and provide AI education, practical plans are lacking from K-12 education leaders themselves. Education leaders must make strategic decisions about how to prepare teachers and students for an AI-infused future. Simultaneously, educators need immediate support and guidance on how to manage the arrival of tools that render some existing educational practices obsolete and prompt the need to teach new skills and awareness. Near term, it may be unrealistic to expect all students to master the ability to develop AI applications; universal AI literacy is a more feasible goal. We introduce a set of short-format, modular AI literacy courses and report how they were implemented and affected teachers' and students' knowledge and perceptions of AI. Using an online questionnaire, we collected data from 265 individuals worldwide who accessed the courses, including 190 teachers who implemented them with over 11,800 students. We conducted 17 teacher interviews to gather feedback and to better understand how courses were adapted for local contexts. Teachers reported an increase in their own and their students' knowledge of AI concepts; and increased optimism about the potential benefits of AI to society and their ability to influence the future of AI. Key takeaways are that AI literacy instruction should be designed for adaptability to local contexts and cultures and that steps should be taken to institutionalize the integration of AI literacy into the regular school curriculum.