Educational AI Tool Use, Attention Span, and Critical Thinking among Secondary School Students : A Correlational Study

Abstract

There is a growing trend in using AI in the education sector and while AI tools are increasingly part of students' learning lives, the relationship between the use of AI tools and students' cognitive learning outcomes in the secondary school level is not well documented in Pakistan. The present study aimed at finding out the relationship between the use of educational Artificial Intelligence tools and concentration spans and critical thinking of students in the private secondary schools of Lahore. A descriptive, cross sectional survey design was used. The data had been gathered from 400 students using a structured 30 item questionnaire comprising of questions related to attention span, educational AI tools, critical thinking, and the demographic questions. Descriptive statistics and Pearson correlations were used to analyze the data. The distribution of AI educational tools across students was high: 340 students (85.0%) used AI educational tools. Mean scores were 3.88 (SD = 0.66) for educational AI tool use, 3.62 (SD = 0.71) for attention span, and 3.54 (SD = 0.73) for critical thinking. There was a moderate positive correlation between the use of AI tools in education and attention span (r = .521, p < .01) while there was a higher positive correlation between the use of AI tools in education and critical thinking (r = .614, p < .01). Also, there was a positive relationship between attention span and critical thinking (r = .486, p < .01). The results in this study suggest that students' self-reported attention and critical thinking behaviors are linked to their self-reported frequency of use of educational AI tools. The study is a cross-sectional study with convenience sampling and self-report measures, so precautions must be taken in order to avoid making causal inferences from the results of the study. The results confirm that a moderately balanced method of teaching and learning is in use, combining the use of an AI system and copying/pasting AI-generated text with independent thinking and actively replicating the task.