BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Paper Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Co-Designing a Culturally Relevant Nine-Week Middle School Artificial Intelligence Curriculum

Sun, April 16, 8:00 to 9:30am CDT (8:00 to 9:30am CDT), Hyatt Regency Chicago, Floor: West Tower - Ballroom Level, Atlanta

Abstract

OBJECTIVE
We are iteratively co-designing a culturally-relevant elective course, Living and Working with Artificial Intelligence, with a group of middle school teachers to ensure it is cognitively appropriate, enjoyable, and relevant for African American, Latinx, and rural students. Our research aims to explore the challenges of teaching and learning AI in middle school classrooms. In particular, we aim to understand the types of support and resources teachers need in the classroom as well as how they adapt the curriculum materials to address the range of their students’ needs and interests.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK & DESIGN FEATURES
Our course is designed for a broad range of students and does not require prior programming experience and aligns with AI4K12’s middle school grade band progression chart (AI4k12.org) and the state’s computing standards. The curriculum uses a combination of inquiry-based and project-based learning approaches (Darling-Hammond, L., Flook, L., Cook-Harvey, C., Barron, B., & Osher, D., 2020; Donovan & Bransford, 2005) to engage students in deep exploration of the Five Big Ideas of AI (Touretzky et al., 2019). We address issues of equity and inclusion in several ways: (1) Prioritize student and teacher choice in the design of a wide variety of curriculum materials; (2) Design all materials to be engaging at different reading levels to allow students to productively deepen their AI understanding. (3) Use of free browser-based AI software to ensure equitable access.

CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
The course (1) Introduces students to the “big ideas” of AI and helps them discover how AI technologies contribute to their daily lives. (2) Gives students hands-on experience with AI demos and software tools developed specifically for K-12, leading to deeper understanding of how AI works and feelings of self-efficacy and identity as AI creators. (3) Provides both technical content and consideration of ethical and societal issues surrounding AI. (4) Provides opportunities to explore AI-related careers in all sectors of society.

FINDINGS
We piloted the co-designed curriculum during two 9-week cycles in Spring 2022 with three teachers in rural, suburban, and urban districts and reached 177 African-American, Latinx, White, and Asian students. We collected data on student and teachers’ confidence perceptions of AI, teacher’s confidence in teaching AI, lesson plans, curriculum adaptations, and pedagogical strategies employed to make AI accessible to middle school students. This talk will report findings on the collaborative structure that fostered the development of a rich collaboration with teachers, lessons learned on how to authentically co-design with teachers and not for teachers, and the types of adaptations teachers made to the co-designed curriculum to best support the needs of their students. These adaptations included: (1) creation of unplugged activities to provide multiple opportunities to understand concepts; (2) creative assessments of student learning; and (3) organizational adaptations to instructional materials.

SIGNIFICANCE / NEXT STEPS / CONCLUSION
This research highlights the value of true partnership with teachers to co-design curriculum and the role co-design plays in providing opportunities for continuous professional learning that deepens teachers' technical knowledge of AI and the research team’s understanding of teacher and student needs.

Authors