AI Literacy and Gender Equity — A Quasi-Experimental STEAM-PBL-AIoT Course for Taiwanese Fifth-Graders

UNESCO estimates around 70 countries have adopted national AI strategies naming AI literacy as a citizenship skill; researchers at National Cheng Kung University (Tainan) and the University of Georgia found gender gaps in AI literacy can already be measured among ten- and eleven-year-olds before any formal AI instruction.

The team first validated a four-part AI literacy questionnaire (affective, behavioural, cognitive, ethical) with 504 Taiwanese fifth-graders. A second, quasi-experimental study then compared two elective AI courses in the second semester of fifth grade at a school in southern Taiwan: a comparison group (n=55) taking a real-world AIoT-applications course, and an experimental group (n=54) following a STEAM-project-based-learning-AIoT AI literacy curriculum.

Both groups improved from pre- to post-test, but the AI literacy course produced larger overall gains. Female students entered both courses scoring lower than male students; by post-test the gender gap had closed in the AI literacy group, and female students in that group outperformed male students in the AIoT-only comparison course. Ethical-reasoning gains were similar across both groups.

The authors caution this is a single-school pilot (109 students across two sections) rather than a multi-site trial, and call for replication before drawing conclusions about scalability.