Do Students Write Better Post-AI Support? Effects of Generative AI Literacy and Chatbot Interaction Strategies on Multimodal Academic Writing

Academic writing increasingly involves multimodal tasks requiring students to integrate visual information and textual arguments. While generative AI (GenAI) tools, like ChatGPT, offer new pathways for supporting academic writing, little is known about how students' GenAI literacy influences their independent multimodal writing skills or how chatbot interaction strategies (passive reactive vs. proactive scaffolding) impact learning. This study examined 79 higher education students' multimodal academic writing performance using a comparative research design. Students completed writing tasks integrating visual data under two chatbot-assisted conditions (passive vs. proactive) and subsequently without AI assistance. Their writing performance was rigorously evaluated across five dimensions, including insightfulness, visual data integration, organisation, linguistic quality, and critical thinking. Ordinal logistic regression and correlation analyses revealed that higher levels of GenAI literacy significantly predicted stronger independent multimodal writing performance immediately after AI assistance removal, particularly for students using passive chatbots requiring active prompting. These results highlight the critical role of GenAI literacy and specific chatbot interaction strategies in shaping students' capacities for independent multimodal academic writing. Our findings emphasise the need for purposeful integration of GenAI literacy training into curricula and balancing external scaffolding support with autonomous learning opportunities. This research offers valuable recommendations for educators leveraging AI-enhanced pedagogies to optimise student writing outcomes and technological engagement strategies.