Date
Publisher
arXiv
This mixed-methods study examined secondary students' interactions with the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT-5 in a formal classroom setting, focusing on attitudes, anxiety, and responses to hallucinated outputs. Participants were 109 16-year-old students from three Greek high schools who used ChatGPT-5 during an eight-hour intervention in the course "Technology." Students engaged in information seeking, CV generation, document and video summarization, image generation, quiz creation, and age-appropriate explanations, including tasks deliberately designed to elicit hallucinations. Quantitative data were collected with the Student Attitudes Toward Artificial Intelligence scale (SATAI) and the Artificial Intelligence Anxiety Scale (AIAS); qualitative data came from semi-structured interviews with 36 students. SATAI results showed moderately positive attitudes toward AI, with stronger cognitive evaluations than behavioral intentions, whereas AIAS scores indicated moderate learning-related anxiety and higher concern about AI-driven job replacement. Gender differences in AI anxiety were small and non-significant, while female students reported more positive cognitive attitudes than males. AI attitudes and AI anxiety were essentially uncorrelated. Thematic analysis identified four pedagogical affordances (knowledge expansion, immediate feedback, familiar interface, perceived skill development) and three constraints (uncertainty about accuracy, anxiety about AI feedback, privacy concerns). After encountering hallucinations, many students reported restricting AI use to domains where they already possessed knowledge and could verify answers, a strategy termed "epistemic safeguarding." The study discusses implications for critical AI literacy in secondary education.
Study at a glance
- Question: How do secondary students perceive, feel anxious about, and respond to ChatGPT-5 and its hallucinations?
- Setting and data: Three high schools in rural metropolitan Athens, Greece; 109 sixteen-year-old students; September to October 2025.
- Method: Mixed methods design combining student surveys and semi-structured interviews following an eight-hour classroom intervention.
Why it matters
Generative AI research concentrates mainly on university contexts, leaving secondary schools under-represented, with few studies intentionally exposing students to AI hallucinations or investigating multiple interaction modalities.
Key findings
- Greek high school students reported moderately positive attitudes toward AI, with higher cognitive evaluations than behavioral intentions, and higher anxiety about job replacement than learning.
- Female students reported significantly more positive cognitive attitudes toward AI than male students, while AI attitudes and anxiety were essentially uncorrelated across the sample.
- After encountering hallucinations, many students adopted epistemic safeguarding by restricting AI use to familiar topics where they could verify responses.
Summary drafted with AI from the full paper and may contain errors. See the full paper for details.
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