What is the Research Telling Us About AI Literacy?

So if you have a headphone recommendation, that won't cause one mic bleed, and two, it has to provide a great listening and talking. Experience. I am all ears, pun intended. The ones that I have right now, the first ones caused some mic bleed, so I was getting echo. And then the ones I have now are just not a great listening experience and listening and talking experience when I'm interviewing people. So that's where we're at. Anyway, again, thank you. Thank you. We made it to episode 10.

We're figuring it out. Thanks for listening and sticking around. However, that is not what today is about because today is National AI Literacy Day. So question number one is AI literacy a tech check or a tech rec? I do this to some of my guests, so I have to do it to myself. If you followed any of my work, you know that I have been traveling the country literally. Preaching. Literally traveling and preaching the importance of AI literacy.

AI literacy is a giant tech check, so it is quite literally my jam to talk about this. I want to spend AI Literacy day talking about something else. I have been traveling in the country preaching something else, but yet related, and that is the research on AI literacy. The research plus my personal experience teaching AI to people of all ages is what is driving my push to educate and preach everyone on A, the importance of AI literacy, and B, increasing AI literacy and people of all ages.

Let's start with a definition, just in case you're not familiar with the term AI literacy, and make sure we're all on the same page of what we're talking about here. There are a lot. Of definitions out there, and I mean like a lot, a lot, a lot. But I like to use the definition from digital promises, AI literacy framework.

It says the knowledge and skills that enable humans to critically understand, use, and evaluate AI systems and tools to safely and ethically participate in an increasingly digital world. I like this definition because it has three clear verbs, understand, use, and evaluate. It's really easy to remember, and they have this really great graphic that shows how all three of those verbs have to occur together. So if you don't understand ai, you won't know how to effectively use it and evaluate it.

If you don't use ai, you're not going to fully understand it. If you don't know how to evaluate AI outputs, then you aren't fully using and understanding it, et cetera. There are several studies out there that define AI literacy, and lots and lots and lots of frameworks that define AI literacy as well. In fact, the number of published definitions doubled between 2022 and 2024. I told you, there's a lot of definitions out there. So like I said, I like the digital promise.

AI literacy framework definition, but if you want more of a definition coming from a research study, there is one study called What is AI Literacy Competencies and Design Considerations, and its definition is a set of competencies that enables individuals to critically evaluate AI technologies effectively communicate and collaborate with ai. Use AI as a tool online at home and in the workplace. So all the definitions are basically saying the same thing in just using different words.

Basically, AI literacy is the foundation of healthy, productive, and ethical and responsible AI use. What is the research saying about AI literacy? This first study I share in almost every AI training I do for educators. It shows the correlation of AI literacy and AI use. The study calls it propensity to use ai. That's what they call AI use essentially. And the name of the study is lower artificial intelligence literacy predicts greater AI receptivity.

So in not so many words, this study found that as a person's AI literacy increases their propensity to use ai actually decreases the study, calls it the magical thinking trap. And this is a quote directly from this study. This lower literacy greater receptivity link is not explained by differences in perceptions of AI's capability. Ethicality or feared impact on humanity.

Instead, this link occurs because people with lower AI literacy are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI's, execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes. In other words, when you don't understand how AI works, that it's just a predicting machine. It's just predicting the next token. You view it as magical and are in awe that it can do human-like tasks. This magical thinking results in less critical evaluation of AI's outputs.

You think it's the answer to everything you think that you can just copy and paste. The outputs that it gives you and you don't need to review and you don't need to edit them. One more thing I want to note about this particular study is that it's not an education study, so most people are like, oh, this come from a college of education. Nope. Nope. It's a marketing study that comes from multiple business professors from different business.

Schools, higher education institutions, I should say, and this really hits home for me. The last two sentences of the abstract of this study says, these findings suggest that companies may benefit from shifting their marketing efforts and product development toward consumers with lower AI literacy. In addition, efforts to demystify ai AKA. Increase their AI literacy may inadvertently reduce its appeal. So just stop and think about that for a second.

This means that companies are preying on people with low AI literacy to get them to buy their stuff.. This is a problem for society as a whole. Especially for our vulnerable populations, which includes our kids. And if you're teaching at the higher ed, not K 12 level, most of your students, the majority of your students still do not have fully developed brains. Our brains don't fully develop till around 25. So the majority of college aged kids still have underdeveloped brains.

I still consider them to be a vulnerable population. Next study is called Chat, GPT in lesson preparation, and it gives us insights into AI literacy as well as whether teachers can leverage generative AI to save time on instructional preparation while not decreasing quality. That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. So in the study, teachers were split into two groups. One was asked to not use generative AI for lesson planning.

The second group was provided access to chat GPT as well as a guide for how to use chat GPT for instructional planning. Okay. So they got a guide that helped them how to learn how to use it. For this task, the teachers with access to chat GPT spent 31% less time creating lessons than their peers. And here is the important part. There was no detectable differences in lesson quality, so multiple AI literacy pieces here. First thing to note is they were given guidance.

They weren't just handed chat, GPT and one thing I didn't note here, , their time savings increased over time. So like the first, I wanna say eight to 10 weeks. , They had like around like a 25% savings or 20% savings, something like that. And then over six months, that time saving increased to 31%, but wait for this and no detectable differences in lesson quality. Here's the AI literacy piece . Teachers use of AI tools. So I told you over time their time savings increased.

Their use of AI tools decreased from 39% to 29%, yet their savings not only persisted, but increased. So the study says that quote, suggesting teachers quickly learn where AI adds value and deploy it more selectively. So this is really reinforcing this idea of when you. Increase AI literacy. Your use of AI or propensity to use AI actually goes down because you start to learn when can it help me? When can it not help me? When should I use it? When should I not use it?

This is really reflected in my personal use of this technology as well. Those two studies show the amount of AI use, but several other studies note a troubling gap between AI use and AI literacy. We know students are already using AI students of all ages with or without guidance, so whether you. Show them how to use it, right? Whether you ban block, open, it doesn't matter.

The research suggests that if the use is unguided, it leads to passive consumption, AKA copy pasting outputs rather than collaborative iterative engagement that actually improves learning outcomes. The question isn't, will they use it, but do they have the literacy to use it? Well, I will link to one of these studies in the show notes.

And by the way, I will link to, , all of the studies I referenced, or if I'm kind of summarizing, I'll link to, , a couple of the studies that I'm referencing now. These studies are focusing specifically on AI skills. There are studies that find that AI literacy instruction doesn't just teach students about ai.

It tends to develop transferable skills such as critical engagement, reflection, and metacognition iteration, communication and collaboration, creativity, and even emotional regulation for certain populations of students like multilingual learners. In other words, when you increase AI literacy, you aren't just focusing on ai. You aren't just focusing on the technology. And I'm hearing this a lot. We don't have time for this. I get it. Those darn standardized tests dictate everything we do.

We've got these massive standards we have to hit. These curriculums that aren't super flexible all of the time, but the research is telling us that we have to find the time. And my approach, if you follow my work, is that I really have this idea that AI literacy is core and. Emerging technologies, technology in general doesn't exist outside of humans. Humans create technology because they went to school and learned core curriculum.

So I kind of take this approach as it doesn't need to be a standalone. Thing. It doesn't need to be that we whittle out more time for another class. It should be integrated into what we're already teaching and , these studies that are showing that it's, they're not just learning about the tech, they're not just learning about ai. So much of AI literacy is understanding how to have a thought partner and iterate and collaborate, for example.

That is a summary of the why, why AI literacy is important. But let's look at what the research says about when we should teach AI literacy for the rest of these points, I'm gonna give more of an overview and summary of the research in general, rather than going into the specifics about specific studies, but again, I'll put those links in the show notes, or I'll put links to a few of the studies I'm referencing in the show notes.

In terms of when most of the research we have on AI literacy programs is focused on middle school, high school, higher ed. In fact, Stanford just recently, so Stanford has this AI and education hub and it has a repository of over 800 AI and education research studies. They did a summary of it just a few weeks ago of kind of looking at those 800 studies in the repository and saying , what do these studies say?

And one of the main findings of that review was that K five AI literacy is really understudied and no surprise. Higher ed is the most studied. That is always the case with research. By the way, I have a book about online learning, and I say in that book that there's way more research on online learning at the higher ed level than there is at the K 12 level, but. It makes sense because college professors are the ones doing the research.

They have much easier access to college aged students than K 12 aged students. So what we have to do is we have to take the findings from that research that is focused on higher ed and kind of combine it with our experience to find this happy medium space. Moral of the story, there's not a ton of research on kind of the win. When you get down to elementary age students, however, there is a framework called AI 4K 12 that maps out AI literacy concepts across all grade levels.

And what that framework makes clear is that the foundational concepts like what is ai, how does it make decisions? Who builds it? Why do they build it? They are absolutely teachable in elementary school and even preschool. Don't panic. I'll talk more about that in a second. So the moral is they typically we're waiting until kids get to high school to take like a computer science class, maybe middle school. We might be embedding some computational thinking in stem and steam and elementary school.

, But really we need to be doing it as soon as possible. And I say. Honestly, as soon as kids start to talk and can communicate and understand what you're saying, you need to start having the conversations. And the key word there is conversations. That does not mean some people, like I said, don't panic. Some people take it to mean that I say we need to teach AI literacy as soon as possible. They, we as humans go to the extreme, right?

So your mind goes to, oh my gosh, we're gonna put kindergartners in Chad, GBT. No. Not the case at all. So much of AI literacy work that I do is not using AI directly, and actually a lot of it is no tech or very, very low tech with students of all ages. I'm super excited. I did this Kickstarter for this AI literacy card deck for elementary kids. I haven't got it yet, but I think it should be coming soon.

And it's basically just a big set of cards that are all completely no tech activities or discussions starters that you can use with kids to start talking about AI literacy. So that's the key. Start talking, start having the conversations. I always use the example. Of what we call in my house, the lady in the corner, A-K-A-A-L-E-X-A, I can't say it or else. It'll start talking to me because I have one in the corner of the room here. , How many households have those, or Hey, Google devices.

I don't know what those are called. I think they're called, Hey, Google. I do not have those, or phones that have S-I-R-I-I can't say that one either. 'cause my phone is right here. I have this whole session I do. That's all about basically this idea that. We don't access technology just through a screen anymore. Think about it. The lady in the corner , has a bit of a screen. The hate Googles, I don't think have a screen at all.

You know, I always use an example of walking to school this morning or work. Your face was highly likely scanned by a video camera using AI technologies to do facial recognition. That's not a screen that's not sitting in front of a computer and interacting with a keyboard and a mouse or a touch screen, technology is literally the infrastructure of the world that we live in. And because of that, you really can't avoid it if you're a member of society.

And we need to have these conversations as soon as possible. So bottom line on timing, don't wait and definitely don't assume AI literacy is only for computer science teachers or only for high school kids . We've covered the why. We've covered the win. Let's talk about the how. How do we teach AI literacy? There is not a ton of research on the how, but what we do have points to three things it needs to be hands-on.

It needs to be iterative, and it works best when it's integrated across subjects rather than siloed into one class. So exactly what I said from my experience. I'm really focusing on, Hey, you don't need an AI literacy class. You don't need an AI class. We need to give teachers the knowledge and curriculum to be able to do this and integrate it into math. And yes, ELA, social studies, electives, everything. Technology and ai. And it's not just ai.

We're talking AI today, 'cause it's AI Literacy day. And this is really one of my passions and goals in my life right now is to talk about AI literacy because I think it is the bedrock of our society going in positive directions But AI literacy is just a branch. A very big important branch, not just a branch under digital literacy. So it's more than just ai.

And now pretty much any tech has an element of AI in it, it's teaching digital literacy and digital citizenship concepts embedded throughout our curriculum and every content area. Back to the how I said, it needs to be iterative. It needs to be hands on. This means we're talking about project based learning, collaborative problem solving, real world context, not worksheets about ai, not watching videos about ai.

That doesn't mean that that can be a tiny part of it, but if your AI literacy work or digital literacy work in general. Is students passively only watching videos and completing worksheets? No, that can be part of it and often having some videos about how AI works. I know code.org has some great videos about how AI works is a great starting point and sparks the conversation, but that can't be it.

That's kind of the, how do we teach it from the student learner lens, but it's important to talk about teachers in particular and how should we teach AI literacy to teachers And surprise, surprise, no, not surprise at all. The research says that technical training alone is not enough. I've been saying this for years, not just me, me and others that work in my instructional technology field, that we can't just teach teachers point and click training. It can't just be technical training.

It has to be embedded. Into their curriculum and instruction and framed around pedagogy, and the research is reflecting this. So there's a study that did a systematic review of 43 studies on teacher professional development for AI in particular. And they found that schools were teachers actually changed their practice. Were the schools that combined technical , skill building with pedagogical reflection. Ongoing support and a culture that made it safe to experiment and fail.

Now I saved the best for last. We did the why. We did the, when we did the how. What's the research saying about those? But it's important to know what are students saying when it comes to AI and AI literacy the consensus is they are saying, teach us. They want to be taught how to use it appropriately and ethically and responsibly. There's a lot of studies out there on this. No surprise, they're almost mostly higher ed focus, but. We have to take at a K 12 level, take the findings from that.

I don't think there's this cutoff at age 18 where we all of a sudden like shift as a learner. Again, our brains aren't fully developed till around 25, so I think we can take a lot from these higher ed studies. , There's a study out there that looked at 99 different studies, and they synthesized all those studies where they interviewed students, all higher ed students on their thoughts and their attitudes towards generative AI in particular, and here's a little clip from the summary of the study.

Students are already using generative AI widely, but often lack confidence about quality, ethics, and appropriate use. They argue that successful integration of gen, AI and higher education depends on giving students explicit guidance, structured activities, and clear expectations so that they can use these tools critically rather than passively. In other words, students overwhelmingly are saying that we are not confident about how to use when to use what's appropriate use.

They want very explicit guidance and very structured activities and very clear expectations on how they should and should not use this technology. They want to learn how to use AI responsibly and appropriately, so let's teach them. There you have it. We did the why, the when, the how as it comes to AI literacy and what the research so far is saying. We also looked at what are students saying, but it's important to note that this is very much a developing area.

Very, very, very much so expect to see more and more studies. This is something I am really staying on top of and using to guide my professional development sessions and advice that I'm giving to schools and teachers and educators and ed tech companies. my make ed tech 100 moment to leave you with on this National AI literacy day is AI literacy is not a nice to have. It's a now to have, the educators who understand that today are the ones who will define. What this is gonna look like tomorrow.

I always say there's a lot of different, everybody always asks like, you know, is AI the existential dread end of humanity as we know it? Is. It just another tool, just another technology. And my answer is always, there are a lot of roads that we could go down with this technology and we wanna make sure that we choose a road with a positive ending. And I really, really think that. AI literacy is the key to that.

And again, the only way you are going to be able to make sure we go down that positive route is to be a part of the conversation and help define what does AI look like in education. Happy AI Literacy Day.