Abstract:

Artificial intelligence (AI) education is still in the exploratory stage for K-12 schools. There is a serious lack of studies that informed schools teachers about AI curriculum design. Accordingly, this paper presented an AI curriculum and examined whether the curriculum improves students’ perceived AI knowledge, attitudes, and motivation towards AI, as well as caters to students with different genders and academic achievement. Inclusion and diversity within school education are primarily based on increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in learning (Xia et al., 2020a, 2017, 2020b). Moreover, teacher autonomy is crucial to the teacher’s motivation and commitment to providing effective learning opportunities for students in AI curriculum (Xia et al., 2016, 2017; Lennert da Silva et al., 2020). Teachers’ capacity to take control their own teaching has also been found to motivate student engagement (Xia et al., 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2021).

AI key content knowledge that falls in the domain of engineering can be suggested and identified by engineering education studies. Accordingly, AI key content should 1) be interdisciplinary, 2) foster AI thinking and techniques, and 3) include AI impact and ethics (Xia et al., 2021; Moore et al., 2014; Riskowski et al., 2009; Roehrig et al., 2012). However, these suggestions do not consider inclusion and diversity that are crucial to the success of engineering education. Can the key content cater to gender differences and students varied academic abilities? Inclusion and diversity are very important for engineering education, particularly in K-12 settings. Catching student interest early on and then following through with that interest at K-12 level may be the key to inspiring more students, particularly for the underrepresented group, to pursue engineering or engineering-related study and/or careers (Delaine et al, 2016).

This paper presented an AI curriculum for Grade 7-9 students and examined whether the curriculum improves student attitude and motivation toward AI, as well as cater to students with 1) different genders and 2) different academic achievement performance in learning AI. Accordingly, the three research questions (RQ) are:
RQ1: Would the curriculum significantly improve the student competence, attitude, and motivation toward AI?
RQ2: Would there be any significant differences between boys and girls in perceived AI knowledge and relevance, and attitude, and motivation toward AI when learning with the curriculum?
RQ3: Would there be any significant differences between high and low achieving students in perceived AI knowledge and relevance, and attitude, and motivation toward AI when learning with the curriculum?

Results show that in the AI curriculum:
1) the students’ self-report indicated that they became more competent, developed more positive attitude and higher intrinsic motivation to learn AI,
2) there were insignificant differences between girl and boys, and
3) there were almost no significant differences between high and low achieving students.

The major conclusion of this paper is that applying key content and teacher autonomy in creating K-12 AI curriculum would benefit varied academic ability and gender students. Student participants in this paper reported that they felt more competent and motivated to learn AI and consider the relevance of learning AI in more favorable manner given the materials in the curriculum.

Keywords:

AI education, curriculum design, K-12 education, inclusion and diversity, teacher autonomy.