Strand 3
Strand 3: Broadening participation through co-design of ethics-centered curricular activity systems
An NSF iSAT team member leads partner teachers in a professional learning session.
Our goal is to design, support, and study how curriculum materials and AI technologies build secondary students’ AI Literacies and advance teachers’ AI-related pedagogical practices. We engage with youth, teachers, and district leaders as co-designers to develop multi-week, AI-partner embedded units that investigate the nature, capabilities and limits, ethics, and societal impacts of AI systems. We also develop professional learning for teachers and study how co-design and implementation advance AI Literacy and guide improvement of the instructional materials. Our guiding research question is: “How can AI-enabled curricular activity systems be co-developed and implemented to support socio-collaborative learning about AI literacy in K-12 classrooms and schools?” To this end, we pursue the following research themes: Co-Design and Revision of a Curricular Activity System to Promote AI Literacy and Implementation Research.
Our objective is to work with students, teachers, and district leaders to design and revise units for developing secondary students’ AI literacy and to support curricular implementation through professional learning for teachers. We will revise three units and develop two new ones: Sensor Immersion (revision), Online Moderation (revision), Self-Driving Cars (revision), Generative AI and Art (new), and Under the Hood (new). These will include instructional materials for students, teacher guides, and teacher professional learning materials. We will integrate AI partner functions into the units, so students learn about AI with AI.
Our goal is to advance implementation research—a kind of research that studies what happens when designs are tested in classrooms—to i form improvements to the units and advance our understanding of the conditions for promoting student AI literacy. Specifically, we aim to build an understanding of: a) the supports needed to implement AI-integrated units into real classrooms with integrity; and b) how teachers’ purposes and their educational contexts shape their adaptations and use of instructional materials.