This AI Literacy Review covers the US Government’s free AI literacy text message course and National Policy Framework for AI, Common Sense Media’s report on AI and kids and families, National Education Association’s advocacy on AI literacy, Black Girls Code’s new initiative, Pew Research Center’s report on teens and AI, National AI Literacy Day 2026, LinkedIn Learning’s free AI learning paths through 2027, AI literacy in Catholic education, Indigenous Kaupapa Māori AI Framework, AI moralization and resistance, Anthropic’s AI interviews with 80,000 people globally, AI adoption in Europe vs. the US, AI literacy for medical students and public health, AI literacy and mental health for children from low-income backgrounds, Google’s free AI literacy training for US educators, AI literacy gaps in higher education, Liverpool Business School’s AI micro-credential for students, AI literacy in creative writing, AI literacy for vocational education students, and more.
General
Common Sense Media’s report 2026 Generation AI: What Kids and Families Think About AI shows what children ages 12-17 and their parents are thinking about AI, differences in AI usage and optimism, and whether there should be legislative safeguards. 7 out of 10 parents and 6 out 10 children believe youth will not be able to function in adulthood without AI, but to be prepared for the future, 83% of both groups agreed that children need to learn to think critically for themselves without AI support.
The National Education Association’s formal response to the National Science Foundation’s request for information on the development of an AI R&D strategic plan advocates for a human-centered, educator-involved AI systems that prioritize fairness and accessibility, rigorous data privacy protections, evidenced-based implementation, and equitable access. The response also states that AI literacy should be part of students’ basic education and educators’ professional development, and that AI literacy should be incorporated across all subject areas and educational levels.
Black Girls Code is forming the Beyond Code Collective as an independent nonprofit ecosystem to bridge the gap between AI inspiration and career employment, with an initial partnership with Zapier and culturally responsive programming available at intergenerational, place-based hubs focused on emerging technologies.
The Pew Research Center in How Teens Use and View AI finds that 56% of U.S. teens have heard a lot about chatbots and 39% have heard a little, but only a quarter think they’re extremely or very confident in their ability to use a chatbot, and around 10% have little to no confidence with using chatbots.
National AI Literacy Day 2026 features events and opportunities for educators, parents, students, and others to learn about AI and promote AI literacy as a foundational skill.
LinkedIn Learning offers free courses in its AI learning paths through 2027 covering career essentials and productivity boosts.
Writing for Catholic news service OSV News, Sister Hosea Rupprecht in AI literacy: A digital examen for the soul that the new challenge for Catholic educators, parents, and ministers is how to address the blurry line between human-created and AI-generated content and how to respond to the Pope’s emphasis on keeping the human person at the center of AI while engaging with AI.
Karaitiana Taiuru releases the Indigenous Peoples AI Framework, or Kaupapa Māori AI Framework, as a three-part framework describing what AI is, how it operates, and implications for governance, offering a different way of describing and evaluating AI outside a Western philosophical tradition.
In the pre-print paper The Moralization of Artificial Intelligence Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello et al. examine AI resistance and how AI is moralized in the news, finding that for some resistance is moral in nature and they are concerned about societal harm and concerns about authenticity. The researchers note that familiarity was a strong predictor of resistance, meaning people with the least experience with AI may be most likely to oppose it and cannot update beliefs through direct experience, and that younger participants were more opposed to AI than older participants, possibly because they are more exposed to critical discourse about AI in social media and peer networks.
Anthropic releases its findings after over 80,000 people across 159 countries in 70 languages talked to its AI Interviewer about how they use AI and their hopes and fears about AI, noting that people outside Europe and the US see AI with more optimism, and people in North America, Europe, and Oceania are more concerned about jobs and the economy.
The National Bureau of Economic Research working paper Mind the Gap: AI Adoption in Europe and the U.S. by Alexander Bick et al. compares AI adoption across Europe and the US, finding a large gap in adoption such as that in 2026 43% of US workers use AI for their job vs. 32% of European workers.
HR Dive’s Kathryn Moody in AI literacy and change management among most-needed HR skills discusses how AI literacy has become the second fastest-growing skillset for HR professionals.
Government
The US Department of Labor launches a free AI literacy text message course called Make America AI-Ready to help workers learn about AI through bite-sized learning and daily challenges across seven days, aligned with the content areas outlined in the department’s recent AI Literacy Framework.
The White House publishes A National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence with point VI covering education programs and workforce training to enable American workers to benefit from AI-driven growth and jobs in an AI-powered economy.
Health
In AI literacy mediates AI assisted diagnosis participation and critical thinking among medical students under supervision, Yang Xin et al. demonstrate that engagement with AI diagnostic tools in clinical rotations under faculty guidance develops medical students’ critical thinking by first enhancing their foundational AI literacy.
In Unequal Gains: The Divergent Impact of AI Literacy on Mental Health Across Socioeconomic Groups, Jaewon Lee and Jennifer Allen examine how AI literacy acts as a vital psychological resource that disproportionately improves emotional resilience and self-esteem for children from low-income backgrounds and argue that AI literacy is becoming a developmental necessity.
Dr. Guido Giunti, chief data officer at St. James’s Hospital Dublin, Ireland’s largest academic teaching hospital, speaks at a global health conference about AI in health systems, their AI literacy program covering awareness and hands-on AI clinics, and the need to build confidence in technology to empower their workforce.
In From resistance to readiness: faculty development as the key to AI literacy in public health José A. Acosta presents a lit review of AI literacy in relation to public health curriculum and health education and discusses the barriers and opportunities in integrating AI literacy into public health.
Education
In Google launches AI literacy training for 6 million U.S. educators Google for Education announces a partnership with ISTE+ASCD to provide free Gemini training and micro-credentials to K-12 and higher education faculty in the US to establish foundational AI competencies for educators and students.
In New Data Shows AI Study Tools Turn Passive Reading Into Active Learning for College Students, Pearson reports that in a study of around 80 million interactions from 400,000 higher education students in the company’s digital materials, students using AI study tools were more likely to engage in active reading behaviors.
In Are AI Literacy Lessons Now the Norm? What New Survey Data Show, Education Week reports that recent survey data from EdWeek Research Center indicates almost 80% of educators say high school students are receiving AI lessons and 73% said the same about 6-8th grade students.
Validated Insights releases a white paper AI as a Competitive Edge showing that only around 1% of American higher education institutions have AI literacy as an instructional priority even while demands in the workplace for AI literacy are growing, and that 87% of recent US graduates wished their school had done more to train them on AI.
Ryan Wright from the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce Center for the Management of IT launches the State of AI in the Commonwealth report with key insights about the AI literacy gap, noting that 40% of faculty and staff are just beginning their AI literacy journey, and about 1.5 million jobs in Virginia are likely to be affected by AI-related changes.
Penn State launches an AI literacy framework with four core elements of technical knowledge, ethical awareness, critical thinking, and practical use and can be adapted for different needs across the institution.
In Experimenting with micro-credentials to enhance AI literacy, Gemma Dale and Michael Drummond of Liverpool Business School discuss their experiment of an online, asynchronous AI micro-credential for business students that ran for six weeks and around ten learning hours. The 50 students completing the micro-credential found it valuable and challenging, and those who were already using AI had the opportunity to reflect more critically on its output.
In The lesson of AI literacy class: Don’t let the chatbot think for you, Natasha Singer of The San Juan Daily Star describes how a Newark, New Jersey high school is using an “AI driver’s license” curriculum in an AI literacy class for seniors to teach them to critically steer technology.
Black Studies Professor Emily Raboteau at CUNY receives an AI innovation award to reconsider creative writing pedagogy and deepen conversations on AI in college writing, and will collaborate with English Professor Briallen Hopper of Queens College to redesign two creative writing workshops for Fall 2026 to teach AI literacy.
In ‘First thing I’ve written in 3 years’: Students’ AI habits prompt teacher training, lesson design, Ed Finkel of K-12 Dive explains that as educators gain AI literacy, they increasingly recognize the necessity of rethinking their assignments and classroom activities.
In Exploring AI Literacy: Voice Recognition Project in Vocational Education, Nikolaos G. Alexis and Evangelia A. Pavlatou demonstrate that hands-on maker projects to train voice-recognition models improve high school students’ affective, behavioral, and cognitive AI literacy and offer a feasible approach to increasing AI literacy among vocational students.
Graham Attwell in Revisiting Digital Literacy in VET: Foundational Skills for the AI Era finds that effective AI training in vocational education requires a shift from teaching general digital skills to developing digital and AI skills in the context of a learner’s chosen vocation, and requires that teachers are digitally proficient.
In The use and usefulness of GenAI in higher education: Student experience and perspectives Jennifer Chung et al. survey over 8,000 students across four Australian universities about their Generative AI usage, finding that over 80% of students have used Gen. AI for study-related tasks and most have learned about AI via informal, self-directed learning by themselves or from friends or family. University resources were least likely to be used for learning about AI. The researchers also found gaps in access and usage among women and other student groups, with men being almost twice as likely to use AI every day compared to women.
In Exploring Engineering Students’ Artificial Intelligence (AI) Literacy and Use of AI in Problemsolving [paywalled] Huihui Qi et al. explore how how sophomore engineering students use AI tools to solve engineering problems and how even though a majority reported high general AI literacy, their self-assessment didn’t correlate with better performance on AI-assisted tasks but doing those tasks did help promote more discipline-specific AI literacy.
In Exploring potential profiles and characteristics of AI literacy among teachers in Chinese higher vocational colleges [paywalled] Meng Li, Chengming Yang, and Qi Wang identify four distinct AI literacy profiles among educators in Chinese higher vocational colleges to advocate for targeted, profile-based professional development strategies.
The Center for Humane Technology podcast interviews Rebecca Winthrop in AI Is Breaking Education. Rebecca Winthrop Has the Blueprint to Fix It. and discusses how the current trajectory of AI in schools risks stunting cognitive development and eroding student-teacher trust, and that people need to be prepared with holistic AI literacy, which kids are craving to talk about with adults.
Leo S. Lo will present his AI literacy framework and how it’s being applied at the University of Virginia and in the context of academic libraries at a Zoom webinar on May 1, 2026 3:00pm ET.
