From artificial intelligence to data collectionHow Can School Teaching Effectively Provide Informatics Knowledge?Doing the Research series
20 January 2025, by Anna Priebe

Photo: Drazen Zigic via Getty Images
From 1 August 2025, informatics will be a required subject in all Hamburg secondary schools. Under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Sandra Schulz at the Faculty of Education, Moritz Kreinsen and the Informatics Education subject group team are researching which methods can effectively provide school students with an understanding of applications like ChatGPT.
Applications based on artificial intelligence are developing even faster and are finding their way into schools. What are you researching in this context?
Numerous studies show that many children use their smartphones und ChatGPT extensively but have no idea how the systems work and use them unreflectingly. This makes the required subject of informatics all the more important so that schools can provide students with knowledge about the technologies they use on a daily basis. Normally, we refer to informatics systems.
In our research, we develop and test—among other things—school teaching tools, because learning how to responsibly use informatics systems can occur only if these tools reliably provide technical understanding. I myself work specifically on applications in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

Where do you begin?
We begin with the ideas about AI that pupils come to class with. Various international studies have found, for example, that many pupils assume that the answers provided by AI systems such as ChatGPT are preprogrammed “on the other side”—that is, it is already determined which answers should be given to a question.
From a constructivist perspective, such ideas form the starting point for learning, where we have to reach the students with our content. But which learning formats are useful for changing these existing constructs so that they conform to scientific facts and concepts? In our study, we looked at conceptual change texts.
What does this mean exactly?
Conceptual change texts are often used in natural sciences education to expand existing ideas. Informatics education is a relatively young field, and we first have to establish which methods are transferable for us.
Conceptual change texts are an instrument for students that follow a specific educational structure. The text we developed specifically for our study first takes up a concrete assumption that the students have agreed to in previous tests. The functionality of the application in question is then explained step-by-step. It is important not to simply say, “Everything you believed up to this point is nonsense.” Instead, relevant aspects are highlighted and used as a basis to refute false assumptions. Here, concrete everyday examples are always important.
Which assumption were you concerned with?
In our study, many of the approximately 70 students from the tenth and eleventh grades agreed in a pretest with the idea that all ChatGPT answers were already preprogrammed. In response to this phenomenon, we formulated the text and explained the informatics concepts of input processing and output as well as machine learning.
Of course, the students not only read the text but also are explicitly guided to reflect on it through tasks. We do not want to simply replace their ideas about how specific AI phenomena work; rather, we want to refute false assumptions and help them to broaden their own understanding.
What was the result?
One week after the intervention, we examined their ideas in a second test. This revealed a statistically significant improvement in the respondents’ understanding of the concepts examined using the example of ChatGPT—that is, they were better able to understand how the IT system works and generates the answers.
How can the findings be applied?
In this pilot study, we were able to show that the instrument also appears to be suitable for informatics education. The research can now be extended, for example, to investigate the long-term effects of conceptual change texts or to compare them with textbook texts, which are still the most common source in schools. And since text is a more traditional medium, we could also think about conceptual change podcasts or concept cartoons and examine these types of media.
Personally, I was also able to contribute our research findings to the Explainable AI in Education group of the European Commission’s Digital Education Hub. This brings together experts from across the EU to develop recommendations on how digital education should be implemented. In our working group, we looked at how AI systems for education can be designed in a way that enables users to understand which processes take place in order to produce results. This can lead to pupils coming to class with completely different assumptions, and that can have a positive impact on learning.
As technology is also used in many subjects outside informatics, teachers of other subjects always play an important role in understanding it. How is this reflected in the teacher training degree program?
Informatics provides systems and methods, while other disciplines’ topics and questions provide the context—for example, climate science, which works with environmental and weather data. Thus, understanding how data is collected and processed with the help of learning systems—so-called AI or data literacy—is the basis for many sciences.
Therefore, we work closely with other disciplines in teacher training. After all, students need to teach pupils data literacy later on and be trained accordingly to do so. In a project that we implemented together with geography didactics and that was funded by the Digital and Data Literacy in Teaching Lab (DDLitLab), students had the opportunity to collect and process data on the topics of weather, climate, and climate change. This gave them hands-on experience in research-based learning. In their careers, they can then later implement it in the classroom and work on specific issues and examples. This will make informatics much more tangible for the pupils.
Doing the Research
There are approximately 6,200 academics conducting research at 8 faculties at the University of Hamburg. Many students also often apply their newly acquired knowledge to research practice while still completing their studies. The Doing the Research series outlines the broad and diverse range of the research landscape, and provides a more detailed introduction of individual projects. Feel free to send any questions and suggestions to the Newsroom editorial office(newsroom"AT"uni-hamburg.de).