This study aimed to investigate the effects of AI literacy education utilizing Problem-Based Learning (PBL) on the AI competency and problem-solving ability of middle school students with intellectual disabilities. The research questions are as follow...
This study aimed to investigate the effects of AI literacy education utilizing Problem-Based Learning (PBL) on the AI competency and problem-solving ability of middle school students with intellectual disabilities. The research questions are as follows.
First, what is the effect of AI literacy education using PBL on the AI competency of middle school students with intellectual disabilities?
Second, what is the effect of AI literacy education using PBL on their problem-solving ability?
The proliferation of generative AI technology enables more efficient and inclusive educational environments. It is essential to provide AI literacy education for students with intellectual disabilities who have difficulty with new learning so that they can effectively use AI functionalities and be instructed on ethical issues that may arise during usage. This study targeted 22 students with intellectual disabilities enrolled at Y1 Middle School, Y2 Middle School, I Middle School, and G Middle School in G Metropolitan City, assigning 11 students to the experimental group and 11 to the control group. The experimental group received AI literacy education utilizing PBL, while the control group received traditional, lecture-based AI literacy education, using a pretest-posttest control group experimental design.
The intervention consisted of 12 sessions of AI literacy education, conducted four times a week for three weeks in each special education class. To assess the outcomes, a self-report AI competency scale and a problem-solving task were administered before and after the intervention. The AI competency scale was composed of four sub-domains: AI identification, AI application, AI use, and AI creation. Meanwhile, the problem-solving task was categorized into three sub-domains: daily life, AI utilization, and information searching. For data analysis,
the Wilcoxon signed-rank test was employed to verify within-group changes, and the Mann-Whitney U test was conducted to compare the differences in the amount of change between the two groups. The findings are as follows.
First, PBL-based AI literacy education had a positive effect on improving the AI competency of middle school students with intellectual disabilities. The experimental group showed significant improvements in all sub-domains and the total score in the post-test compared to the pre-test, while the control group showed significant improvements only in AI identification, AI use, and the total score. As a result of comparing the pre-to-post change scores between the two groups, the improvement in the experimental group was statistically significantly higher than that of the control group in the domains of AI application, AI use, AI creation, and the total score. Second, AI literacy education applying PBL had a positive effect on enhancing problem-solving skills. Comparing the pre-and post-test scores of the experimental group revealed statistically significant improvements in the AI utilization domain and
the total score, whereas the control group showed no significant improvement in any domain or the total score. However, when comparing the change scores between the experimental and control groups, no statistically significant differences were found in any domain. Therefore, it is difficult to conclude that the effectiveness of PBL is statistically and clearly superior to that of theory-oriented direct instruction. These results suggest that AI literacy education using PBL is an effective approach to enhancing the AI competency and problem-solving skills of middle school students with intellectual disabilities, emphasizing the necessity of practice-oriented AI education. Future research is required to develop more long-term, structured programs and to verify their effectiveness.
key words: Problem-Based Learning, AI Literacy, AI competency, Intellectual Disabilities, Problem-Solving Ability