{"id":188477,"date":"2025-10-03T23:29:27","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T23:29:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/188477\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T23:29:27","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T23:29:27","slug":"why-we-should-be-skeptical-of-the-hasty-global-push-to-test-15-year-olds-ai-literacy-in-2029","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/188477\/","title":{"rendered":"Why we should be skeptical of the hasty global push to test 15-year-olds\u2019 AI literacy in 2029"},"content":{"rendered":"

If 2022 was the year OpenAI knocked our world off course with the launch of ChatGPT<\/a>, 2025 will be remembered for the frenzied embrace of AI as the solution to everything. And, yes, this includes teaching and schoolwork.<\/p>\n

In today\u2019s breakneck AI innovation race, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), along with the European Commission<\/a>, have called for the development of unified AI literacy strategies in kindergarten to Grade 12 education. <\/p>\n

They have done this through an AI Literacy Framework<\/a> developed with Code.org, and a range of experts in computational thinking, neuroscience, AI, educational technology and innovation \u2014 and with \u201cvaluable insights\u201d from the \u201cTeachAI community<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cTeachAI community\u201d refers to a larger umbrella project providing web resources targeting teachers, education leaders and \u201csolution providers\u201d<\/a>. Its advisory committee includes companies like Meta, OpenAI, Amazon and Microsoft<\/a> and other for-profit ed tech providers, international organizations and government educational agencies and not-for-profit groups.<\/p>\n

The rush to establish global standards for AI literacy has been further energized by a recent OECD program announcement.<\/p>\n

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) \u2014 which tests 15-year-old students of<\/a> member nations in literacy, numeracy and science every three years \u2014 is introducing a media and AI literacy assessment<\/a> in 2029. This is related to what it calls an \u201cinnovation domain\u201d of learning. <\/p>\n

There have been consultations about<\/a> the AI literacy framework<\/a>, but it\u2019s misguided to think that educators and the general public at large would be able to comment on this in an informed way before AI has been widely accessible to the public. <\/p>\n

The OECD\u2019s hasty push for PISA 2029 threatens to obscure essential questions about the political economy<\/a> that is enabling the marketing and popularization of AI, including relationships between business markets and states.<\/p>\n

Marketing, popularizing AI<\/p>\n

Essential questions include: Who stands to benefit most and profit from proliferating AI in education? And what are the implications for young people when national governments and international organizations appear to be actively promoting the interests of private tech companies? <\/p>\n

We agree with a growing community of researchers that regard calls for AI literacy as being based on ill-defined and preliminary concepts: for example, the draft framework speaks about four areas of AI literacy competency that involve: engaging with AI, creating with AI, managing AI and designing AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"People<\/p>\n

People take photos of an AI robot at the All In artificial intelligence, in 2023 in Montr\u00e9al.
\n THE CANADIAN PRESS\/Ryan Remiorz<\/p>\n

As we try to grasp the meaning of terms such as \u201cAI skills\u201d and \u201cAI knowledge,\u201d the educational landscape becomes both vague and confounding.
\nEducators are all too familiar with the legacy, often related to commercialization<\/a>, of attaching various modifiers to notions of literacy<\/a> \u2014 digital literacy, financial literacy, the list goes on.<\/p>\n

\u2018The future\u2019<\/p>\n

By framing AI as a distinct, readily measurable capability, the OECD has signalled that it can impose its own understanding onto AI, leaving school communities globally with the task of simply accepting and implementing this presumed all-embracing vision of the future amid profound and alarming existential and practical questions<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Efforts to frame AI literacy as a vehicle to prepare young people for \u201cthe future\u201d are a recurring theme of influential global policy bodies<\/a> like the OECD. <\/p>\n

Elsewhere, research has shown<\/a> how these policy shifts over the past three decades follow a familiar pattern \u2014 the OECD functions as an influential policy entity<\/a> that establishes its own definitions of student progress through standards and benchmarks for assessing the quality of education programs around the globe. In doing so, it imposes a single understanding on what are diverse systems with distinct cultures<\/a>. <\/p>\n

As digital education expert Ben Williamson<\/a> points out, this burst of \u201cinfrastructuring AI literacy\u201d not only involves \u201cbuilding, maintaining and enacting a testing and measurement system\u201d but will also \u201cmake AI literacy into a central concern and objective of schooling systems.\u201d<\/p>\n

In doing so, it will sideline other important subjects, gear up schools and learners to become uncritical users of AI and turn schools into a testing ground for AI developments. <\/p>\n

Read more:
\n Youth social media: Why proposed Ontario and federal legislation won’t fix harms related to data exploitation<\/a><\/p>\n

Lack of discussion around teachers<\/p>\n

We also have other concerns.<\/p>\n

In our preliminary research, yet to be published, we analyzed the AI Literacy Framework document<\/a> and found a significant lack of discussion regarding the role of teachers. The document directly mentions teachers only 10 times and schools nine times. By comparison, AI is mentioned 442 times, while learners and students are referenced approximately 126 times. <\/p>\n

This suggests to us that teachers and formal schooling seem to have been removed from any major role in these frameworks. When they are mentioned, they appear a more of a prop to AI and not a critical mediator.<\/p>\n

Educators and national education systems are facing a one-size-fits-all solution to a wider societal issue that attempts to defuse, depoliticize and naturalize what ought to be urgent, engaged conversations by teachers and the education profession about AI, education, learning, sustainability and the future.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Urgent conversations with teachers and the education profession are needed about AI, education, learning, sustainability and the future. A crossing guard guides children across the road in Surrey, B.C., in 2021.
\n THE CANADIAN PRESS\/Darryl Dyck<\/p>\n

Current classroom realities<\/p>\n

As political theorist Langdon Winner<\/a> reminded us more than 40 years ago, technologies have politics that rotate around both problems and opportunities. These politics ignore some realities and amplify others. <\/p>\n

Well-intended promoters of AI literacy in schools in Canada call for professional development and resources to support the adoption of AI. Yet these aspirations and hopes for positive change need to be contextualized by the current realities Canadian teachers face<\/a>:<\/p>\n

63 per cent of educators report their ministries of education are \u201cnot supportive at all;\u201d<\/p>\n

Nearly 80 per cent of educators report struggling to cope;<\/p>\n

95 per cent of educators are concerned that staff shortages are negatively impacting students.<\/p>\n

Proceed with slowly with care<\/p>\n

Ours is not a call for educators to be luddites and reject technology<\/a>. Rather, it\u2019s a call to the profession and the public to collectively question the rush to AI and the current framings of AI literacy as an inevitable policy trajectory and preferred future for education.<\/p>\n

Both the limited time frame of the next few months<\/a> to respond to the AI Literacy Framework \u2014 following its May 2025 release<\/a> \u2014 and the pre-emptive decision by the OECD to proceed with its PISA assessment in 2029 signals a race to a finish line.<\/p>\n

As with the recent return to school and the annual reminders about the need for caution in school speed zones, we need to avoid distractions \u2014 and proceed slowly, with care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If 2022 was the year OpenAI knocked our world off course with the launch of ChatGPT, 2025 will…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188478,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-188477","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}