How Can Generative Artificial Intelligence Enable Students’ Digital Literacy Cultivation?—An Empirical Study Based on Information Science and Technology Curriculum

Abstract

Digital literacy is a vital component of the comprehensive qualities of talents in the digital era. Students’ digital literacy cultivation serves as an essential path to developing high-quality talent that meets the demands of the digital era. Nevertheless, the concept of students’ digital literacy cultivation has overly emphasized the operational use of technical tools, neglecting the human‒AI collaborative autonomous learning advocated in the intelligent era. This has become a bottleneck that restrains students’ digital literacy cultivation. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) holds immense potential in creating flexible, open, inclusive, and shared human‒AI collaborative environments. These environments could guide students toward self-organized learning, offering a new opportunity to overcome the aforementioned challenges. Accordingly, this study constructed a students’ digital literacy cultivation model based on self-organized learning theory and proposed the generative artificial-intelligence fusion in self-organized learning environments (GAiSOLEs) teaching model aimed at fostering students’ digital literacy. Moreover, this study performed a quasi-experiment in the information science and technology curriculum, aiming to verify the impact of the GAiSOLEs teaching model on students’ digital literacy cultivation. The results showed that the GAiSOLEs teaching model could significantly improve students’ overall digital literacy level, as well as enhance their information awareness, computational thinking, and digital learning and innovation skills. However, its effect on improving information social responsibility was not statistically significant. In light of this, this study suggests that attention should be paid to technological ethics and security, the construction of controllable educational large language models, and the cultivation of students’ digital knowledge and skills to avoid cognitive traps. Furthermore, it is advised to provide GenAI teaching training to enhance teachers’ digital literacy.

Keywords

digital literacy / generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) / human‒AI collaboration / information science and technology curriculum / teaching model

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Higher Education Press