Strand 3
Strand 3: Broadening Participation Through Co-design of Ethics-Centered Curricular Activity Systems
Strand 3’s primary goal is to design, implement, and study how specialized curricula and AI technologies can build robust AI literacy for middle and high school students while advancing modern teaching practices. By partnering directly with youth, educators, and district leaders, we co-design comprehensive, multi-week learning units. These AI-enhanced modules empower students to deeply investigate the core mechanics, practical limits, ethical boundaries, and broader societal impacts of artificial intelligence.
We also develop professional learning for teachers and study how co-design and implementation advance AI Literacy and guide improvement of the instructional materials. To ensure lasting impact, we also deliver targeted professional training for educators and rigorously study how our materials perform in live classrooms. We use those real-world insights to continuously refine and improve our instructional tools. 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. 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 our understanding of the conditions for promoting student AI Literacy. Specifically, we aim to build an understanding of the supports needed to implement AI-integrated units into real classrooms with integrity and how teachers’ purposes as well as their educational contexts shape adaptations and use of instructional materials.