Original title: Digital Media Literacy in the Age of AI: Exploring the Comfort–Competence Gap Among University Students in the United Arab Emirates
The study asked 300 university students in the United Arab Emirates how comfortable they felt using AI and how well they thought they could judge its output. Students rated their comfort a little higher than their ability to evaluate AI critically. The difference was small, and many students showed the opposite pattern. Because students reported their own views rather than completing skill tests, the study cannot tell whether they can actually judge AI output well.
Imagine packing for a trip and feeling sure you know what belongs in your bag. The tricky part is knowing whether you packed the right things, not just feeling confident as you pack. In this paper, feeling comfortable using AI is like packing with ease, while judging its answers is like checking whether the choices were actually right.
Students who use AI for information need more than ease with the tools; they also need to assess what the tools produce. This study finds a small, tentative difference in self-reports, not proof that students lack the skills to evaluate AI in practice.
The study uses self-reported perceptions, so it cannot establish students' actual ability to evaluate AI. Its small aggregate difference is exploratory: no item-level contrast was significant, many students showed the reverse pattern, and the result lost conventional significance when comfort was removed from the index. The cross-sectional design and limited measures do not establish causes or strong conclusions from null results.
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Digital Media Literacy in the Age of AI: Exploring the Comfort–Competence Gap Among University Students in the United Arab Emirates — Farah Saboune, Layal Halawani, Barakat S. Alzyoud et al. — Societies — doi:10.3390/soc16100331
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.