Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly pervaded and reshaped almost all walks of life, but efforts to promote AI literacy in K-12 schools remain limited. There is a knowledge gap in how to prepare teachers to teach AI literacy in inclusive classrooms and how teacher-led classroom implementations can impact students. This paper reports a comparison study to investigate the effectiveness of an AI literacy curriculum when taught by classroom teachers. The experimental group included 89 middle school students who learned an AI literacy curriculum during regular school hours. The comparison group consisted of 69 students who did not learn the curriculum. Both groups completed the same pre and post-test. The results show that students in the experimental group developed a deeper understanding of AI concepts and more positive attitudes toward AI and its impact on future careers after the curriculum than those in the comparison group. This shows that the teacher-led classroom implementation successfully equipped students with a conceptual understanding of AI. Students achieved significant gains in recognizing how AI is relevant to their lives and felt empowered to thrive in the age of AI. Overall this study confirms the potential of preparing K-12 classroom teachers to offer AI education in classrooms in order to reach learners of diverse backgrounds and broaden participation in AI literacy education among young learners.
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Curriculum to Broaden Participation in Cybersecurity for Middle School Teachers and Students
To both broaden and increase participation in any STEM field such as cybersecurity, we need to attract more students. Research shows that to do this, students need to be engaged with cybersecurity during middle school. There is a lack of age-appropriate and classroom-ready cybersecurity curriculum, however, and many teachers feel unprepared to teach the subject. To address this gap, the CyberMiSTS project team created a summer professional development workshop for middle school teachers that integrated a recent research-based understanding of cybersecurity into a curriculum that is accessible to both middle school students and their teachers. The project sought to encourage participation of a broad and diverse set of students in the field of cybersecurity by showing them how human relations play an important role in cybersecurity. We discuss our prior related work using branching web comics to introduce middle school students to cybersecurity concepts and careers, and the state of evidence-based research into effective approaches and methods for cybersecurity education. We identify challenges to broadening the pipeline for a truly diverse cybersecurity workforce that can meet industry’s need for cybersecurity professionals with a wide range of experience and skills. The paper introduces our approach for the teacher professional development workshop, maps how we designed the project to meet our research goals, and documents initial findings regarding what is needed to increase teacher self-efficacy about cybersecurity concepts and careers in a middle school classroom.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1821753
- PAR ID:
- 10313321
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 11th IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Lu, Baochuan ; Johnson, Jeremiah W (Ed.)This paper presents the GenCyber Teacher Academy (GTA), a unique professional development program that provides Connecticut's high school teachers across various STEM disciplines with opportunities to explore cybersecurity concepts and incorporate them in their curriculum. Participating teachers experienced inquiry-based learning, focused classroom discourse, and collaborative learning that centered on GenCyber Cybersecurity Concepts. Results indicate GTA enabled teachers to reflect on best practices in incorporating cybersecurity concepts while promoting online safety. Moreover, GTA established a sustainable GenCyber Teacher Academy Teaching Learning Community of high school teachers supported by a community of practitioners that will collectively shape the future of cybersecurity in Connecticut.more » « less
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The ongoing workforce shortage of skilled and diverse cybersecurity professionals coupled with the continued upward trend of cybercrime has led to an increased number of funding opportunities from the federal government to support projects focused on technical skills development. Significant emphasis is placed on academic transfer pathways and education-to-career pathways for students from K-12 to community college and beyond. Utilizing funding from multiple sources, faculty have intertwined grant project activities to increase awareness of cybersecurity careers and academic pathways, emphasizing digital forensics and incident response. The two grant projects, Cyber Up! and GenCyber Girls, aimed to develop college-level curriculum and cybersecurity workshops for female high school students. Project activities were synthesized to create a summer camp for high school students based on the curriculum developed for the college programs in digital forensics and incident response. The synergy between the projects has shown an increase in female participation in the digital forensics course and helped build interest in cybersecurity careers among K-12 students.more » « less
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