This research will focus on student teachers’ use of AI in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes in the two partner institutions and will be completed in three phases:

Phase 1: Identification of types of AI will be a literature-based review of a variety of curriculum uses of AI as defined by the 5 key ideas of AI and used to support the development of the AI Readiness Journey materials for online delivery.

Phase 2: AI-Readiness Journey in ITE will begin with a survey to measure the student teachers’ attitudes towards AI before the ‘journey’. The survey items build on our previous work on Technology Readiness from the RAP project (2018) with additional measures using an AI Attitude scale. This approach is aligned to research by Schepman & Rodway (2022) who found a correlation between AI attitudes and the measures of Technology Readiness.

The participants will also engage with the AI-Readiness Journey materials to develop a greater awareness and understanding of AI in general and how it can be used to complement existing teaching and learning in the classroom. Ideally the participants from this phase will volunteer to engage with Phase 3 of the research.

Phase 3: Generative-AI as an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for student teachers will focus on training the student teachers in how to use ChatGPT (or other GAIs) as intelligent tutoring systems to support their knowledge development and understanding of key areas of teacher education such as core terminology, theory-practice links, applications of GAI to support medium term planning and GAI-based reflection.