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

TL;DR

This study explores secondary students' attitudes, anxiety, and strategies when using ChatGPT-5 in classrooms, highlighting pedagogical opportunities and challenges like hallucinations and privacy concerns.

Contribution

It provides novel insights into student interactions with ChatGPT-5, including attitudes, anxiety levels, and coping strategies, in a real educational setting.

Findings

Students have moderately positive attitudes toward AI.

Students experience moderate AI-related anxiety.

Students adopt epistemic safeguarding to handle hallucinations.

Abstract

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.