Planning: NSF FF: Planning: AI Literacy Afterschool Intervention

Award ID: 2627494

This FINDERS Foundry award supports a prototype of an AI tool and corresponding AI literacy lesson plans to support upper elementary students engagement with STEM homework. AI's use during homework contexts remains largely unstructured and elementary students may not yet be developmentally prepared to critically evaluate AI-generated information. However, AI tools paired with appropriate AI literacy skill development, may be one solution for existing gaps in science and mathematics comprehension. This project investigates how bounded AI tools can help keep families engaged as co-learners in childrens science and mathematics homework. The prototyped is designed to reduce barriers related to prior knowledge while supporting meaningful, family-centered learning interactions. The project will develop accessible AI tools and family-facing AI literacy supports to strengthen connections between home and school learning, which can be scaled to afterschool programs regionally, statewide, and nationally. This FINDERS Foundry award collaboratively creates a bounded prototype of an artificial intelligence (AI) Large Language Model (LLM) tool and AI literacy lesson plans to support upper elementary (grades 35) students engagement with science and mathematics homework in ways aligned with classroom expectations. The developed and piloted bounded AI homework LLM will be constrained for structured prompting to support guided reasoning rather than unrestricted answers. The AI literacy lesson plans and family-facing supports will prepare children and their parents to use the tool productively and ethically. echnical tasks include defining structuredprompting constraints, designing childappropriate explanation mechanisms, and building lesson materials that help students and caregivers interpret AI output critically. Findings from this project will produce a conceptual framework to align AI tools with outside-of-school learning contexts, which can then be scaled across afterschool programs and informal learning models. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Lindsay Portnoy