This AI Literacy Review covers the Society for Human Resource Management’s advocacy statement to Congress on AI literacy investment, an HR survey on managers feeling unready to lead AI-fluent workforces, Shaw University divinity school’s new doctorate in AI and Moral Agency, a TEDx Talk on the AI Literacy Compass, how agentic AI should reshape college curricula, Australian teens’ AI anxieties, UNICEF’s push to embed child rights in AI governance, UNESCO’s report on AI literacy training for civil servants, Bipartisan Policy Center’s brief and insights on aligning education and workforce systems, AI literacy needs in local government, NPR’s report on teens drafting the mock STUDENT FIRST Act for K-12 AI rules, Cambridge’s updated Life Competencies Framework, Digital Education Council’s global survey of AI in higher education, University of New Orleans’s Empowering AI Literacy micro-credential, University of Cincinnati’s AI literacy framework for creative disciplines, Penn State’s Beyond the Podium OER on AI and public speaking, the AI-readiness gap among adult educators, studies on nursing students’ AI literacy and its ties to lifelong learning, Boston University Law’s Certificate in AI for Law Practice, AI literacy curriculum in Singapore, a Beijing high school’s AI literacy partnership with Intel and Lenovo, a taxonomy of AI reading and writing literacy practices, and AI literacy in education research.
General
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) submits an advocacy statement to Congress’ AI hearing recommending investment in AI literacy, digital fluency, and stronger alignment between higher education and labor market needs.
HR Dive’s Managers say they don’t feel ready to lead an AI-fluent workforce by Lara Ewen covers the results from a survey from Indeed and YouGov of over 1,000 job seekers and 300 hiring decision-markers that found 43% of managers don’t feel equipped to lead a workforce with expertise in AI, workers don’t necessarily feel comfortable doing what employers want them to be doing with AI, and 52% of workers said they weren’t getting the AI training they needed. 31% of employers said AI fluency would be a required skill for jobs within the next two years, but most workers didn’t consider themselves ‘AI native’.
In the TEDx Talk on YouTube An Inclusive Approach to AI Literacy Uchenna Victor Moses introduces the AI Literacy Compass and promotes everyone having a role to play in an AI-powered world whether or not they are technically-minded.
In A historic divinity school is offering the first doctoral degree in ‘AI and moral agency’ Yonat Shimron writes about Shaw University’s plans to offer a degree track of a Doctor of Education in AI and Moral Agency to help the divinity school prepare students to build AI literacy for vulnerable communities and emphasize social justice and ethics.
In Agentic AI and How It Will Change Work Wally Boston argues that colleges need a new mandate for what to teach students in the face of agentic AI, and they must go beyond simply adding an AI literacy module and ensure students understand how AI agents interact with data and tools in their chosen field, whether that’s business, computer science, or the health professions. Colleges have the capacity for disciplined experimentation rather than prohibition to meet the workforce challenge that multiple sources are identifying across the next few years.
The University of Sydney and AI Youth Council’s exploration into Australian teens’ 6 AI Anxieties published in July 2026 reveals teens are concerned about founders of AI companies being untrustworthy, shrinking career opportunities, AI threatening human thought and destroying creativity, and unclear classroom expectations about how they should use AI.
Legal
Charlie Amiot in It’s Not the AI. It’s the Lawyer: We Don’t Have a Hallucination Problem, We Have a Serious Ethics Problem argues that law schools needs to provide students with grounded and accurate AI literacy to properly prepare them for the profession, and that law librarians should be invested in and resourced to help provide a real AI literacy curriculum.
Government
The UNICEF Office of Innovation calls on government and private sector partners to embed child rights in global AI governance through building AI literacy and supporting children and their caregivers to thrive in digital environments, and investing in digital infrastructure and connectivity to close the AI divide, and its AI in Play initiative is intended to help further these goals.
UNESCO’s Beyond the Black Box: Reducing Governance Blind Spots Through AI Literacy for Civil Servants highlights the experiences of participants of the AI Literacy Training for Civil Servants program and how AI governance becomes an often unexpected part of the journey.
UN University rector Tshilidzi Marwala argues for the importance of educating legislators about AI as an essential part of governance infrastructure, so they understand AI enough to be able to regulate it and make the regulations enforceable.
The Bipartisan Policy Center’s brief Learning and Working in the Age of AI recommends ways for US policymakers to better align the education-to-workforce pipeline and ensure systems are fit for the future, including creating a national talent council, adopting a skills-first framework with savings accounts to fund lifelong learning, and expanding AI literacy initiatives in schools and the workplace. Its updated Q1 AI Insights for Policy Makers answers questions about how AI is changing the nature of work and skills needed by employees and whether education and workforce systems are prepared for a new era of work and potential job changes and job losses.
In StateTech’s AI Literacy in Local Government: Why Workforce Readiness Matters as AI Adoption Grows Jessica Balen covers how AI is impacting the local government sector and perspectives from the Partnership for Public Service on the elements of AI literacy for employees in the public sector.
In Residents Look to Governments for Essential AI Skills Julia Edinger reports on public demand for AI skills and various initiatives by cities across California, Arizona, and New York.
NPR’s Cory Turner in Adults have struggled to set rules for AI in school. These teens figured it out covers the results of 98 teens from 50 states getting together in Boston in a replica of the US Senate to draft and ‘pass’ legislation for K-12 schools about AI, with requirements such as states needing to provide AI literacy as soon as students have access to classroom devices, AI use to be banned on graded tests, and teachers being allowed to require an oral defense if they suspect inappropriate AI use. The 9-page mock legislation is titled the Safe Technology Use, Data Privacy, and Ethical Norms for Teaching—Fostering Integrity and Responsible Systems in Teaching (STUDENT FIRST) Act of 2026 and available online.
Education
The Cambridge University Press & Assessment updates the Cambridge Life Competencies Framework (CLCF) to include AI literacy, with practical classroom examples that support language development and awareness about AI in real-world situations.
The Digital Education Council’s AI in Higher Education Global Survey 2026 presents results from 45,000+ responses from students and faculty across 35 countries, with only 29% of students believing instructors are well equipped to guide them on AI use (this number is 17% for US students) and 72% of students saying assessments don’t reflect the skills and judgement they’ll need in the workplace.
The University of New Orleans plans to launch a free Empowering AI Literacy micro-credential for students in January 2027 with five online units and digital badges showing they have learned about the impact of AI on life and work and know more about how to prompt AI ethically and effectively.
The University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning develops a strategic framework for AI literacy that looks at how AI in the creative disciplines demands understanding how emerging tech like AI intersects with creativity, design thinking, and authorship, and acknowledges that students and staff need to be prepared for the future of creative practice in the age of AI.
Penn State launches an updated open educational resource (OER) called Beyond the Podium: AI, Speech and Civic Voice that embeds AI literacy into public speaking curriculum, asking students to consider how AI affects communication, bias and misinformation, and the development of effective messages.
Jerry H. Yamashita in Who Trains the Trainers? A Note on Adult Education’s AI-Readiness Gap discusses the gap in AI literacy frameworks regarding the teachers of adult learners who are preparing to teach AI and what competencies they might need that are specifically tailored to adult learners rather than K-12.
In Levels of Artificial Intelligence Literacy Among Nursing Students: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Lin Zhao et al. assess the literature available on nursing students’ AI literacy levels and the influence of AI training on their levels.
In Generative AI literacy as a mediator between lifelong learning and AI competence in nursing students: A regression-based cross-sectional study [paywalled] Nadiye Barış Eren and Banu Terzi find that a lifelong learning tendency is positively associated with AI literacy and AI usage and competence.
In Beyond AI Literacy: Why the Future of Legal Education Is Still Human-Based Misty Evans from Insight into Academia talks with Angela Onwuachi-Willig, PhD, JD, Dean of Boston University School of Law about the ongoing impact of AI on the legal profession and legal education, and the university’s Certificate in AI for Law Practice which will give students hands-on experience with AI tools during their study.
The Houston Home Journal article AI literacy, drone technology among other skills taught at Academy of Innovation beginning this fall discusses how students in grades 6-12 will be encouraged to learn AI literacy and ethics on a local AI platform and be prepared for the unknown future ahead of them.
In Give our children a licence to think: What AI literacy should look like in The Business Times, authors Jesper Kallestrup, J. Adam Carter, and Sriram Raghavan argue that Singapore needs a curriculum that addresses the cognitive risks of AI and prevents youth with strong reasoning skills from losing them to AI. They propose a three-stage curriculum with evidence-based tasks including a journal, source audit, and evaluation activity as opposed to rote examinations.
Beijing No. 80 High School partners with Intel and Lenovo to bring AI literacy into everyday teaching using the Intel Skills for Innovation framework and project-based learning, including having students explore cancer research and learn about data, models, and modern life science research.
University of Technology Sydney’s Amara Atif shares the presentation Template to Transformation – Building AI Literacy and Academic Integrity in a First-Year Subject on how to maintain academic integrity in a postgraduate IT course with 280+ students, most international and in their first year, through providing more clarity around responsible use of Generative AI and asking students to fill out a weekly template to make their use of AI transparent and reflective. After 9 weeks, 81% of students reported significantly improved or moderately improved AI literacy, and 75% felt more comfortable using and declaring Generative AI use.
In A Taxonomy of Literacy Practices for Engaging with Artificial Intelligence: Reading and Writing in the Age of Generative AI Amy Hutchison, Marissa Filderman, and Chinecherem Ezeihejafor propose a taxonomy of literacy practices for engaging with AI, with seven interconnected practices that students engage in when they are reading and writing with AI: Engaging with print-based text, Navigating to Relevant Sources, Engineering Prompts, Evaluating Critically, Regulating Comprehension, Understanding of Generative AI, and Revising.
In Human-centered AI for teacher educators: Designing professional learning for critical AI literacy Evrim Baran et al. explore how the principles of Human-Centered AI and critical AI literacy can inform the design of professional learning resources for teacher educators, with a five-module curriculum proposed that offers a pathway for better preparing future teachers to be responsible in their use of AI.
In Reclaiming the writing process using AI: a scaffolded writing assignment that promotes critical thinking, reflection, and accountability Hannah Meyer Schapiro, Manuela Tripepi, and
Julia Blackley reflect on their redesign of an undergraduate life sciences assignment that asks students to create a script for a 5-minute video and then illustrate and record it, providing an opportunity to think critically about AI output and develop their prompting skills.
In Informal STEM Learning as a Pathway to Youth’s AI Literacy: A Mixed Methods Study Charlotte JuliAnn-Marie Avery discusses how informal STEM learning such as in summer camps can support youth AI literacy, with results from her study of 104 youth ages 12-17.
In Climate-control ChatGPT for EFL writing and AI literacy Hesham Aldamen et al. explore the use of ChatGPT on English as a Foreign Language writing at the University of Jordan, and whether requiring learners to justify and re-author their own claims under different Generative AI conditions can strengthen their development of responsible AI literacy and argumentation.
In the pre-print Contra Literacy-Laundering: Mechanistic Critical AI Literacy Ishani Ray and Olivia Guest argue for a reorienting of the debate about large language models (LLMs) that draws on cognitive science, feminist labor analysis, and critical pedagogy, and conclude that critical AI literacy is the sensible way forward.
In AI Literacy and Innovative Behaviour Among Chinese University Students in the Context of Sustainable Development in Higher Education: A Moderated Serial Mediation Model Yangzhou Zi et al. find that university students’ AI literacy is significantly and positively associated with their innovative behavior and those with higher levels of AI literacy may be more likely to transform AI into resources that support innovation.
NewTechKids’ Deborah Carter shares initial observations from teaching an AI literacy program for students ages 11-12 at two schools in Amsterdam, including that students use chatbots regularly outside of school but are usually banned or restricted from using in school, were unfamiliar with the concept of ethics in terms of tech usage and AI design, were aware of some of the dangers of AI and outspoken about data centers, and planned to use chatbots in their upcoming high school years when their workload increased.
