An Insight into Cultural Competence and Ethics in K-12 Artificial Intelligence Education

As artificial intelligence education (AI) continues to be integrated into the mainstream educational system across countries, cultural competence and ethical considerations should be emphasized to ensure effective AI learning. Literatures has established that integrating elements of cultural competence within technology mediums has helped students understand difficult topics from computer science concepts learned in class. It is also argued that student with an ethical orientation of AI education is more likely to learn more about impacts and implications of AI. Hence, this study was conducted to understand how students’ cultural competence, and ethics combine to influence AI content. We surveyed Nigerian high school students after an experimental teaching session. A total of 596 students provided useful responses for the analysis that was done using WarpLS software. We performed structural equation modelling to understand the relationship among the variables utilized in the study. The result shows that cultural competence and ethics significantly influence AI content. This study’s results further shows that the association between ethics of AI and AI content has the highest predictive value which emphases the vital role of ethics in AI learning. This study also tested school location differences in the research model and discovered that urban students’ perception is higher than their rural counterpart on the adopted variables in relation to AI content. Overall, the results suggest that stakeholders and educators should emphasize cultural elements and humanistic thinking as well as ethical considerations in the design of AI content and instructional materials. We discuss the findings and propose future directions.