Technological support to foster students’ artificial intelligence ethics: An augmented reality-based contextualized dilemma discussion approach

Research evidence has emphasized the potential of questioning-based dilemmas and has contextualized role-play simulation to foster students' artificial intelligence (AI) ethics. Therefore, this study combined the viewpoints to design a contextualized dilemma discussion approach in the context of developing primary school students' AI ethics. However, without case-specific and suitable guidelines, students might have difficulties participating in the learning tasks to play different roles in the AI ethical dilemma discussion. Accordingly, for this study, we developed an augmented reality (AR) learning system-based contextualized dilemma discussion approach to foster students' active engagement in learning AI ethics with dilemma discussion using visualized AR guidance and feedback. A quasi-experiment and lag sequential analysis were executed by recruiting 79 primary school students to examine the effects of the proposed approach. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach was better able to improve students' learning achievements of AI ethical awareness, ethical reasoning, and higher order thinking tendency than the mobile learning system-guided contextualized dilemma discussion approach. Lag sequential analysis findings identified that the proposed approach could promote students’ AI ethical learning behavior patterns by some crucial guidelines, including (1) embedding the non-intrusive AR guidance and feedback in the contextualized dilemma discussion, (2) immersive role-playing scenarios, and (3) case-based visual discussion. Administrators could provide a supportive environment to promote the combination of AR guidance and the contextualized dilemma discussion approach to improve the effectiveness of learning AI ethics.