Enhancing AI literacy in education: A multicountry pre-post quasi-experimental evaluation study

This study examines the effectiveness of targeted professional development workshops in enhancing AI literacy preparedness among educators in Romania, France, and Finland, within the framework of the TADAM (Tools & Awareness about Disinformation, Algorithms & Media) project. Using a pre-post design with independent groups, we assessed educators’ perceived preparedness across four dimensions: AI literacy promotion, local knowledge development, training facilitation, and stakeholder networking, before and after participation in country-specific workshops. Results indicate that participants assessed following workshop completion reported substantially higher preparedness levels across all four dimensions compared to those assessed before the workshops, with effect sizes ranging from medium-large to large. Psychometric analysis confirmed excellent internal consistency and strong unidimensional structure of the preparedness measure. Overall, the findings suggest that competency-based professional development models emphasising active learning, collaborative codesign, and contextual adaptation may be associated with meaningful gains in educators’ perceived preparedness in emerging technological domains, while acknowledging the methodological limitations inherent in non-randomised designs.