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To increase students’ AI literacy, experts suggest using curricula rather than technical lenses, incorporating technology into classrooms offline with younger children, helping everyone understand how artificial intelligence works, and especially helping students understand that chatbots are not humans.
“Look at the entire K-12 curriculum across all content areas and find ways to incorporate AI literacy into existing standards,” said Jessica Garner, managing director of innovative learning at ISTE+ASCD. For example, she said, “There are language arts standards that deal with examining sources.”
Garner added, “Younger children can understand concepts without actually using a device. I always take a very deliberate approach when thinking about my youngest students’ use of technology.”
Yvette Renteria, chief program officer at Common Sense Media, said that while school board members and district leaders may not, teachers should not assume their students don’t know what AI is.
“It’s important that everyone comes from a level playing field for policies and decisions to be made,” she said. “If adults can understand what that is and explain it clearly to students, then they understand that this is not a human being on the other side of the screen.”
Renteria said some students use AI for informational purposes, as previous generations used encyclopedias and later Google, but others rely on it for emotional support.
“We just need to set the level,” she said. “How does this impact learning and accessing information, knowing what is true and what is not? Ultimately, how does this impact children’s critical thinking and creativity?”
Renteria suggests having fundamental conversations about the value of human connection at the earliest ages, and emphasizes that AI has its time and place. In grades 3 through 5, educators begin to introduce behind-the-scenes details and point out that the AI learns through repetition how to teach a dog to fetch.
“This is what the system is about: You give it information, and the system starts to understand who you are and what you need,” Renteria said.
Educators should be most concerned about the quasi-social relationships that students sometimes form with bots, such as on social media, during middle school, Renteria said.
“That may or may not apply to humans,” she says. “And in high school, you can go a little higher. What does this mean for you in terms of college and career readiness, along with not sacrificing your critical thinking skills and creativity?”
Garner agrees that school leaders need to ensure that AI is a tool for designing learning experiences that deepen critical thinking and creativity, rather than diminish cognitive abilities.
“This is more than just a tool. It’s the learning experiences designed with the tool in mind that allow teachers to deepen or replace the thinking types of their students, and that’s not what we want,” she says. “The role of the teacher is more important than ever. …Teachers need to understand and be intentional about how they want their students to engage with content and AI.”
Garner said an assignment that requires students to write a three-paragraph essay and cite sources could easily be delegated to AI. But when you relate the topic to something they’ve experienced or a personal reflection on the decisions they made and why, it becomes more difficult to outsource to a bot, she said.
Another approach is to ask students to break the task into smaller parts and get feedback from the AI at each step.
“It’s a change in the role of AI in supporting students,” she says. “It will take longer to teach the writing process in such situations, but the level of support will increase in the long run.”
Ultimately, Renteria said, educators at all levels need to provide guided conversations and structures based on a community approach for teachers, school leaders, and parents to understand how their students are using AI and how to protect them from potential harm.
“It’s about making sure that the teaching and learning that exists in the school space is still centered around the subject matter expertise of the teaching and learning tools, and that the AI tools are there to support those systems rather than replace them,” she said.
Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified Jessica Garner, managing director of innovative learning at ISTE+ASCD. The story has been updated.
