Finnish 5th and 6th graders' misconceptions about Artificial Intelligence
This addresses the need for AI literacy education by revealing children's misconceptions, though it is incremental as it builds on emerging research in the field.
The study investigated misconceptions about AI among 195 Finnish 5th and 6th graders, identifying three categories such as non-technological and anthropomorphic AI, and found that most children had low self-assessed AI knowledge, indicating superficial misconceptions.
Research on children's initial conceptions of AI is in an emerging state, which, from a constructivist viewpoint, challenges the development of pedagogically sound AI-literacy curricula, methods, and materials. To contribute to resolving this need in the present paper, qualitative survey data from 195 children were analyzed abductively to answer the following three research questions: What kind of misconceptions do Finnish 5th and 6th graders' have about the essence AI?; 2) How do these misconceptions relate to common misconception types?; and 3) How profound are these misconceptions? As a result, three misconception categories were identified: 1) Non-technological AI, in which AI was conceptualized as peoples' cognitive processes (factual misconception); 2) Anthropomorphic AI, in which AI was conceptualized as a human-like entity (vernacular, non-scientific, and conceptual misconception); and 3) AI as a machine with a pre-installed intelligence or knowledge (factual misconception). Majority of the children evaluated their AI-knowledge low, which implies that the misconceptions are more superficial than profound. The findings suggest that context-specific linguistic features can contribute to students' AI misconceptions. Implications for future research and AI literacy education are discussed.