TY - JOUR
T1 - Artificial Intelligence (AI) Literacy in Early Childhood Education
T2 - The Challenges and Opportunities
AU - Su, Jiahong
AU - Ng, Davy Tsz Kit
AU - Chu, Samuel Kai Wah
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors
PY - 2023/1
Y1 - 2023/1
N2 - Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy has become an emerging topic in digital literacy education research. However, it is still under-explored in early childhood education (ECE) since the AI curriculum for young children has just been designed in recent years. A scoping review was conducted to examine the thematic and content analysis of 16 empirical papers from 2016 to 2022. This scoping reviews evaluate, synthesize, and display 16 studies on AI literacy in early childhood education, including curriculum design, AI tools, pedagogical approaches, research designs, assessment methods, and findings. The discussion of the AI literacy implementation in ECE contributes to providing references for educators and researchers to design interventions to engage young children in AI learning. Further, we identified a set of challenges and opportunities of AI literacy. Several challenges included (1) lack of teachers' AI knowledge, skills, and confidence; (2) lack of curriculum design; and (3) lack of teaching guidelines. Although educators meet challenges at the beginning stage of developing AI instructional design for young children, AI learning could bring learning opportunities and foster young children's AI literacy in terms of AI concepts, practices and perspectives. We foresee that there will be a growing number of age-appropriate curriculum and tools for the ECE level. At the end, we also make some recommendations for future researchers and educators to improve AI literacy research and learning design in early childhood education.
AB - Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy has become an emerging topic in digital literacy education research. However, it is still under-explored in early childhood education (ECE) since the AI curriculum for young children has just been designed in recent years. A scoping review was conducted to examine the thematic and content analysis of 16 empirical papers from 2016 to 2022. This scoping reviews evaluate, synthesize, and display 16 studies on AI literacy in early childhood education, including curriculum design, AI tools, pedagogical approaches, research designs, assessment methods, and findings. The discussion of the AI literacy implementation in ECE contributes to providing references for educators and researchers to design interventions to engage young children in AI learning. Further, we identified a set of challenges and opportunities of AI literacy. Several challenges included (1) lack of teachers' AI knowledge, skills, and confidence; (2) lack of curriculum design; and (3) lack of teaching guidelines. Although educators meet challenges at the beginning stage of developing AI instructional design for young children, AI learning could bring learning opportunities and foster young children's AI literacy in terms of AI concepts, practices and perspectives. We foresee that there will be a growing number of age-appropriate curriculum and tools for the ECE level. At the end, we also make some recommendations for future researchers and educators to improve AI literacy research and learning design in early childhood education.
KW - AI
KW - AI education
KW - AI literacy
KW - Challenges and opportunities
KW - Early childhood education
KW - Learning and teaching AI
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85151039917&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.caeai.2023.100124
DO - 10.1016/j.caeai.2023.100124
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85151039917
VL - 4
JO - Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence
JF - Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence
M1 - 100124
ER -