RET Site: Research Experience for Teachers in Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare

The RET site at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN will be centered on promoting AI fluency in healthcare, particularly among school districts in rural Minnesota. Rural Minnesotans lack many of the opportunities afforded to other high school students in the state, and exposure to emerging tools will help encourage them to pursue careers in healthcare and AI and, more generally, will train them as patients to better understand the nature of their care and the role that AI is poised to play. A key focus of this experience will not only be the technical underpinnings of AI but also its role in society, risks associated with its application in a high-stakes area like healthcare, implementation challenges, and ethics/privacy implications. High school teachers will conduct research over a 7 week period under the guidance an AI researcher working in the healthcare space and will select a project that is aligned with their goals. In parallel, they will use these experiences to craft a curriculum in collaboration with Mayo Clinic education specialists. Importantly, they will work closely with other high school teachers in the program, both past and present, to share insights about their research and curriculum development efforts, as well as the challenges they face in their school districts. Mayo Clinic education researchers will follow up with participants of this program to evaluate outcomes and to assist with further refinements to the program and to the teachers’ implementation. This evaluation will help to inform future iterations of the program as well as enable broad dissemination outside Minnesota to guide educational paradigms in this emerging area. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.