Evaluating Undergraduate Students’ Trust and Comprehension on Ai-Written and Human-Written Popular Science Articles

The emergence of artificial intelligence is a turning point to so many things including in the education field and this AI is now being used to produce science writing for the use of the public. Upon this turning point in science education yet only little known about how undergraduate students respond to such materials compared to how they respond to works authored by human. That is why this study evaluated undergraduate students' trust and comprehension of an AI-written and a human-written popular science article covering the same topic. The research design used in this study is the comparative design specifically the project-based evaluation design and a sample of 35 students was selected from a population of 17,000 200-level undergraduate students in Taraba State University. The students read the articles written by AI and the one written by human and then completed a structured questionnaire that measured trust, comprehension and article preference. The data collected was analysed using frequency, percentages and mean scores and the findings of the study showed that students rated the article written by human much higher in trust with a mean range from 3.66 to 3.83 than the article written by AI with a mean range of 2.49 to 2.70 and then a grand mean of 3.34 confirmed the overall preference of undergraduate students for materials authored by human. The findings also showed that comprehension was strong as 62.9% students correctly answered all the comprehension items while 28.6% showed a moderate comprehension and only 8.5% showed low comprehension. And when asked to choose between human-written article and AI-written article, 68.8% of students showed they preferred the human-written article while 31.4% of the students show they preferred the AI-writren article. Then the study concluded that science writing generated by AI can support understanding but is yet to have the confidence of undergraduate students as the one authored by human.

AI and Human-Written science articles, Science communication, Trust, Comprehension

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