From Naïve Certainty to Critical Complexity: Transformative Effects of an AI-SSI Curriculum on High School Students' Socioscientific Orientation

This study examines the effects of a theory-guided, Artificial Intelligence-related Socioscientific Issues (AISSI) curriculum on high school students' socioscientific orientations (SO). While SSI-based pedagogy is recognized for enhancing scientific literacy and moral development, its specific effects within the domain of AI ethics remain underexplored. Employing a mixed-methods pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design, this research investigated the influence of a 10-week AI-SSI intervention on 95 Chinese tenth-graders’ SO and emotional engagement. Interestingly, findings revealed significant declines in students’ self-reported SO—specifically in ecological worldview, social and moral compassion, and socioscientific accountability—within the experimental group. However, qualitative interview data suggest that these declines reflect cognitive complexification and the development of intellectual humility, as students transitioned from simplistic, absolutist views to more nuanced, conditional, and critical understandings of AI dilemmas. Correlation analyses further unveiled an emotion-cognition decoupling, with weakened links between positive affect and faith in scientific evidence, alongside a stronger connection between moral concern and perceived responsibility. These findings imply that initial decreases in self-reported competencies may signal deeper epistemic development, including enhanced critical reasoning and more calibrated self-awareness of complexity. This study underscores the need for assessment strategies that can capture such intricate cognitive and emotional transformations. Overall, the findings demonstrate that AI‑related SSI instruction can foster the sophisticated ethical reasoning necessary for navigating an AI-saturated world, with important implications for AI ethics education, civic literacy, and responsible innovation.