To boost students’ artificial intelligence literacy, experts suggest using a curricular rather than technological lens, integrating the tech into the classroom offline with younger children, ensuring everyone knows how it works, and making sure students in particular know that chatbots are not people.
“Think about the full K-12 curriculum in all content areas, and find ways to attach AI literacy to existing standards,” said Jennifer Garner, managing director of innovative learning at ISTE+ASCD. For example, she said, “There are language arts standards that address looking at the source of information.”
Younger children, Garner added, “can understand the concepts without actually going on a device. I always take a very cautious approach to thinking about your youngest students being on technology.”
Teachers should not assume students don’t know what AI is — although school board members and district leaders might not, said Yvette Renteria, chief program officer at Common Sense Media.
“In order for there to be policies and decisions made, it’s important that everybody is coming from a level playing field,” she said. “When adults know what it is, and they’re able to articulate that with the student, they understand that this isn’t humans behind the screen.”
While some students leverage AI for informational purposes, as previous generations used encyclopedias and then Google, some lean on it for emotional support, Renteria said.
“We have to just level-set,” she said. “How does this impact learning and accessing information, knowing what is real and what is not? Ultimately, how does this impact kids’ critical thinking and creativity?”
At the youngest ages, Renteria suggests having basic conversations about the value of human connection, stressing that AI has its time and place. From grades 3-5, educators can start introducing the details behind the scenes, pointing out that AI learns the way you might teach a dog to fetch — through repetition.
“That’s what the system is: You’re feeding it information, and it starts to understand who you are and what you need,” Renteria said.
The middle school years are when educators need to be most concerned about the parasocial relationships students sometimes form with bots, including on social media, Renteria said.
“That may or may not be with human beings,” she said. “And then in high school, you’re able to get a little higher-level, what does this mean for you in terms of preparedness for college and career,” alongside “not compromising your own critical thinking skills and creativity.”
Garner agrees that school leaders need to ensure AI is a tool for designing learning experiences that deepen critical thinking and creativity, and not offloading cognition.
“It’s not just the tool: It’s the learning experience designed with the tool in mind that allows teachers to either deepen the type of thinking students are doing, or to substitute it, which is what we don’t want,” she said. “The role of the teachers has never been more important. … They have to be intentional, knowing how they want students to engage with the content, as well as AI.”
An assignment in which a student is asked to write a three-paragraph essay and cite sources could be offloaded to AI easily, Garner said. But relating a topic to a personal reflection about an experience they had — or a decision they made and why — makes it more challenging to outsource to a bot, she said.
Another approach is to break down assignments into smaller pieces and ask students to get feedback from AI at each step.
“It’s a shift in the role of AI to be a support for the student,” she said. “It’s going to take longer to teach the writing process in that situation, but the level of support will be better in the long run.”
Ultimately, educators at all levels need to provide guided conversations and structure based on a community approach in which teachers, school leaders and parents understand how students are using AI and how to protect them from potential harms, Renteria said.
“It’s about making sure that teaching and learning that exists in school spaces is still centered on the subject matter expertise of teaching and learning tools, and making sure the AI tools are there to support those systems, and not to replace them,” she said.
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