Development and evaluation of artificial intelligence literacy training for teacher education students

Synthesis: Le, Huynh, Dang, Pham, Nguyen, and Nguyen (2026) develop and evaluate a design-based research (DBR) intervention providing GenAI literacy training for teacher education students. Arguing that existing AI literacy programs overemphasize technical knowledge and pre-GenAI tools, the study integrates contemporary AI competency frameworks into a workshop prototype. The workshop was piloted with 14 master's students and evaluated with 29 teacher education students. Findings indicate the intervention effectively enhanced overall AI competency Self-Efficacy, with positive emotional responses from 87.1% of participants and shifts toward critical exploration of GenAI tools for teaching.

Key Findings

• Design-based research produced design principles for GenAI literacy training in teacher education, addressing the gap between technical AI knowledge and pedagogical application
• Pilot with 14 master's students followed by evaluation with 29 teacher education students showed enhanced overall AI competency Self-Efficacy
• 87.1% of pilot participants expressed positive emotional responses (curiosity, inspiration, excitement); 12.9% expressed concerns about AI's societal impact
• Half (51.1%) reported shifting perspectives about learner and teacher roles; 40% expressed intentions to critically integrate GenAI into future teaching
• AI ethics gains shifted from significant to marginally significant, suggesting pedagogical and Assessment competencies may require longer-term development

What this means for practice

• Faculty developers. Build GenAI literacy training around the study's four design principles: critical reflection on teachers' roles and ethics, active and experiential learning, scaffolding of self-regulated learning, and authentic formative assessment.
• Faculty developers. Pair self-efficacy scales with artifact-based rubrics rather than relying on self-report. The 29 teacher education students reported moderate to high AI pedagogy and assessment competence, yet their TPACK-rubric lesson plans scored lowest on creative GenAI application (M = 1.64 for TPK6 and TPCK7).
• Instructors. Assign discipline-specific, authentic tasks — lesson design, assessment planning, material creation — so students practice critical evaluation of GenAI outputs where they will use them; given hands-on time, the cohort explored an average of 2.67 tools.
• Instructors. Scaffold self-regulation deliberately with metacognitive checklists, guided prompting strategies, and output-evaluation rubrics to counter over-reliance, and model those practices yourself.
• Administrators. Treat AI competency as an ongoing, cross-disciplinary curriculum effort rather than one-time certification: a single short workshop raised overall self-efficacy (median 3.79 to 4.42 on a 1–5 scale) but not AI pedagogy or assessment competence.

Limitations

• Small, single-site samples: 14 master's students in the pilot and 29 final-year teacher education students at one university in the evaluation, with only 27 completing both pre- and post-surveys and 24 submitting lesson-plan artifacts.
• Short intervention: a single workshop, which the authors name as a limit on generalizability and which may explain why AI pedagogy and assessment competencies needed longer-term or more targeted development.
• Self-report measurement: the primary outcome was the TAICS self-efficacy scale, and self-reported pedagogy competence did not match the rubric-scored lesson plans; the AI ethics gain fell from significant to marginally significant after Benjamini–Hochberg correction.
• No control group: the design-based research design compared pre–post scores within one cohort, and voluntary participation in the first iteration may have over-represented students already interested in AI.

Citation

Le, T. H., Huynh, L., Dang, B., Pham, H.-H., Nguyen, N. T. V., & Nguyen, A. (2026). Development and evaluation of artificial intelligence literacy training for teacher education students. British Journal of Educational Technology.