2025-2028 AI Literacy
(NSF Award # 2524322)

Advancing rural upper-elementary students’ AI literacy through children’s literature and strengthening teachers’ capacity to teach AI.

This newly funded project is recognizes how artificial intelligence is increasingly shaping how people learn, work, and participate in society. This project aims to enrich rural upper-elementary students’s AI literacy through a curriculum that integrates children’s literature, storytelling, and hands-on machine-learning experiences. Designed in close partnership with rural teachers, the project introduces students to machine learning that connects reading, writing, and computational thinking. Using the CoCo+AI platform, students will move from processing AI-themed stories to creating and training machine-learning models with their individual narratives to make abstract AI concepts more concrete, meaningful, and accessible.

This strategic integration of AI, elementary literacy instruction, and storytelling/writing advances research and practice in AI literacy education. By centering children’s literature as an instructional tool and entry point for AI concepts, the project will provide literacy resources to rural elementary students and simultaneously build rural teachers’ confidence and capacity to teach AI in their specific contexts. The project will be implemented across multiple schools, reaching hundreds of upper-elementary students and supporting teachers through co-design, professional learning, and classroom literacy instruction. This project aims to broaden participation in AI learning, strengthen elementary AI literacy, and prepare young learners to critically understand and engage with AI technologies that will shape their future workplaces.