British Journal of Educational Technology最新文献

With the increasingly ubiquitous presence of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in digital society, educators appeal to foster the public‘s general knowledge about AI from young children. Studies have been conducted to create learning activities for children‘s development of AI literacy, but seldom did they investigate the resources children have prior to instruction. The purpose of this study is to explore young children‘s preconceptions of AI and the sources of their viewpoints. A total of 261 students aged 7 to 9 from a public elementary school in a Southern Chinese city were recruited to finish the draw-a-picture task, and 32 students participated in the follow-up sharing in the classrooms. Through the drawing analysis, we identified five categories to describe young children‘s impressions of AI, including the appearance of AI, tasks handled by AI, environment, human–AI relationship, and feelings and attitudes towards AI. Moreover, our analysis revealed that everyday technology and media act as two main sources of young children‘s preconceptions of AI. This research offers methodological and empirical contributions to AI literacy research and practical insights for AI production developers, policymakers and curriculum designers.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in the daily lives of young learners, there is growing interest in exploring how they conceptualize AI prior to formal instruction. This qualitative study investigates the pre-instructional conceptions of key AI concepts held by upper elementary students (n = 75), focusing on five aspects: AI representation, functionality, working mechanisms, ethical considerations and the concept of intelligence. Data were collected through an integrated, multimodal approach, including student drawings, a ranking activity, and both individual and collaborative interviews. Findings reveal a wide range of student preconceptions across all five aspects, reflecting the complexity and diversity of their thinking. In particular, we introduce an ‘XY-axis’ framework to map student conceptions of AI functionality, distinguishing between engagement versus utility and creative/adaptive versus repetitive/routine tasks. Regarding intelligence, student views ranged from a naturalist view that values autonomy and independence from human inputs to a technicist orientation that emphasizes technical complexity and multifunctionality. On ethical issues, students generally expressed positive attitudes towards AI, often focusing on its benefits and conveniences—likely shaped by prevailing social and policy discourses in China. These findings underscore the importance of addressing student misconceptions through a conceptual change lens and designing age-appropriate, culturally relevant pedagogies that build on learners' existing ideas while guiding them towards scientifically grounded understandings of AI.

With the advent of large language models (LLMs) as feedback providers in education, there is a pressing need to investigate the potential effectiveness of the feedback provided by such artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The purpose of this 2 × 2 mixed-design study was thus to investigate biases that students may have in their perceptions of feedback messages and feedback providers as a function of the feedback provider label (between-factor; educators vs. LLMs) and the feedback message quality (within-factor; low [performance evaluation + definition] vs. high [performance evaluation + definition + worked examples + text references]). Data from 173 university students were analysed with linear mixed-effects models. Results indicated that students processed the predetermined feedback messages in an unbiased manner because they evaluated high-quality feedback more positively than low-quality feedback, independently of the feedback provider label. However, the results suggested provider-induced biases in students' perceptions. For instance, compared to an educator label, an LLM label reduced the perceived trustworthiness of the feedback provider. Nevertheless, and despite the social biases that may occur when students are confronted with feedback that is labelled to originate from an LLM, the quality of the feedback message seems to be the more crucial factor in shaping students' positive perceptions of the feedback messages and the feedback providers.

Social presence has been hypothesized to facilitate successful learning in digital and online learning environments. Instructor presence in instructional videos is suggested to enhance learners' social presence. However, research is still relatively rare regarding the elementary school learner population. The current experimental study investigated whether embedding an animated human-like artificial pedagogical agent in an instructional video compared to having only a voice could evoke a sense of social presence and improve learning in a sample of primary school learners. The study confirmed that a sense of social presence of a virtual instructor can be fostered through a digital animated pedagogical agent; however, there was no effect on learning performance, nor did social presence mediate a relationship between learning with a pedagogical agent and learning performance.

Li, X., Lan, Y.-J., Pi, Z., Qi, G. Y., Grant, S., & Sun, J. (2025). Pedagogical agent positioning in external videos improves English academic presentation proficiency in desktop virtual reality settings. British Journal of Educational Technology, 56, 1507–1529. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13531

The third author's affiliation was incorrect. It should have been:

Xiaofei Li¹ | Yu- Ju Lan² | Zhongling Pi¹ | Grace Yue Qi³ | Scott Grant⁴ | Jinmei Sun⁵

¹Faculty of Education, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, China

²Department of Chinese as a Second Language, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

³ School of Humanities, Media and Creative communication, Massey University, New Zealand

⁴Chinese at the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

⁵Research Center for AI and STEM Education, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, China

We apologise for the error.

Among the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, speaking is particularly challenging for foreign language learners due to the lack of practice contexts. Owing to the popularity of mobile devices and wireless networks, the mobile video-based learning (MVBL) approach, which delivers instructional content via mobile devices (such as smartphones and tablets), has been recognized as an effective method to enhance spoken language proficiency in the target language. To motivate learners and to facilitate meaningful spoken Japanese practice, this study proposed an MVBL approach which enables students to leverage mobile technology for foreign language presentation by structuring learning content through student-produced mobile videos (SPMV). This approach connects the learning process to real-life contexts to create a multisensory and engaging educational experience. To assess the efficacy of the proposed methodology, a quasi-experimental teaching approach was implemented in a Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) conversation course in the Department of Japanese Language at a university in Taiwan. Participants were two classes of first-year university students. One class constituted the experimental group (N = 34), which practised speaking training using the SPMV-based learning approach, while the other class constituted the control group (N = 31), which practised using the conventional MVBL approach. The results showed that the SPMV approach led to improvement in the Japanese oral performance of the experimental group, which performed significantly better than the control group in terms of oral performance, group self-efficacy and satisfaction with the learning mode. It is recommended that second or foreign language teachers adopt the SPMV-based learning approach. The findings can be a reference for teachers wishing to utilize this approach in the context of second/ foreign language education.