Dissertation Title: AI Literacy as Civic Literacy: Developing Youth as Responsible Citizens in a World with AI

Abstract:
Schools are facing urgent questions about how to prepare young people to navigate an AI-powered world. This dissertation argues that AI literacy for young people must go beyond technical education and workforce preparedness — it must cultivate the next generation of citizens capable of understanding, critiquing, and shaping the systems that will govern their lives. Drawing on the "policy knot" framework, which treats the practice, policy, and design of sociotechnical systems as fundamentally intertwined, this dissertation identifies and addresses three interconnected gaps in how we currently support youth in relation to AI: gaps in knowledge, policy, and design.

First, I ask: what do young people need to know to work toward responsible AI use? I present a framework grounded in technical literacy, virtue ethics, and civic action. The framework is then demonstrated through the design and evaluation of \textit{Orbiting the Virtueverse}, an educational game that helps youth understand virtues and their application to decisions about AI use.

Next, I explore which policies are needed to support youth in using AI responsibly, and who should be involved in creating them. I propose a process for developing school AI policies grounded in community values and evaluate approaches that center student and adult stakeholders. I present two workshops with school administrators showing how policy can be designed with school values in mind, and introduce Student Voices in AI, an after-school program that supports youth in shaping AI policy at their schools, with results from a 15-school pilot across the U.S. I surface key tensions in both the creation and operationalization of school-level AI policy.

Third, I evaluate how chatbot design affects youth civic decision-making, finding that chatbots can increase students' confidence in civic reasoning while also shaping the questions they ask and the choices they make.

This dissertation makes the case that supporting youth in their use of AI is not solved by any single intervention, be it better education, smarter policy or thoughtful design, but through ongoing research that attends to all three at once.

Committee members:
Cynthia Breazeal
Professor, Media Arts and Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Karrie Karahalios
Professor, Media Arts and Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Eric Klopfer
Professor, Department of Comparative Media Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Meg Leta Jones
Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor,
Department of Communication, Culture and Technology
Georgetown University