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arXiv2026

Artificial Intelligence in Secondary Education: Educational Affordances and Constraints of ChatGPT-4o Use

The purpose of this study was to examine, from the perspective of secondary education students, the educational affordances and constraints of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in teaching and learning. The sample consisted of 45 students from the 2nd year of General Lyceum (11th grade, ages 16-17) in Greece, who, after becoming familiarized with ChatGPT-4o and completing six activities, filled in an open-ended questionnaire related to the research purpose. Open, axial, and selective coding of the data revealed that students recognize five educational affordances: the creation of new knowledge building on prior knowledge, immediate feedback, friendly interaction through messaging, ease and speed of access to information, and skills development. Concurrently, three main constraints were identified: content reliability, anxiety about AI use, and privacy concerns. The study concludes that students are positive toward AI use in education.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

ChatGPT-5 in Secondary Education: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Student Attitudes, AI Anxiety, and Hallucination-Aware Use

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.

cs.CY↗