EMPOWERING TEACHERS’ AI LITERACY: ASSESSING CURRENT UNDERSTANDING, CHALLENGES, AND STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVEMENT BASED ON THE UNESCO AI COMPETENCY FRAMEWORK FOR TEACHERS (AI-CFT)

Abstract

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more prevalent in education, which presents the challenge for educators to acquire the knowledge, skills, and ethical awareness needed to use AI in a responsible and effective way. An Assessment of AI literacy of teachers in institutions under the Federal Directorate of Education (FDE) in Islamabad was conducted in this respect drawing on UNESCO Artificial Intelligence Competency Framework for Teachers (AI-CFT) as its conceptual framework. The quantitative cross sectional survey design was used. The AI literacy assessment has been developed by researcher, based on the five UNESCO domains of AI literacy: Human-Centred Mindset, AI Ethics, AI Foundations and Applications, AI Pedagogy, and AI for Professional Learning. The instrument was  validated by experts and pilot tested with 40 teachers who were not included in the main study. Pilot administration gave an acceptable overall Cronbach's alpha of .794, thus the instrument is reliable and suitable for the main administration. A total of 135 teachers in six administrative regions of FDE were then sampled and data collected. Descriptive statistics, Welch's independent-samples t-test, one-way ANOVA and thematic analysis of open-ended responses were used. The results demonstrated that the overall level of AI literacy was high with the mean score of 21.30 out of 25 (85.2 %), 86.7 % of teachers were identified as having high AI literacy, 11.1 % as moderate and 2.2 % as low AI literacy. AI Applications (91.1%), AI for Professional Learning (88.0%) and Human-Centred AI (86.1%) had the highest domain performance while AI Foundations (81.6%) and AI Ethics (80.4%) were comparatively weaker. There were no statistically significant gender or teaching level differences in AI literacy. The needs identified were formal AI training, infrastructure and internet connectivity, hands-on learning opportunities, time, equipment and institutional support, as identified by teachers. The study suggests that building teacher AI literacy necessitates ongoing, hands-on, ethical professional learning, provided with robust infrastructure, mentoring, and institutional support.