Investigating Secondary School Students’ Shared Epistemic Agency with GAI in Online Scientific Explanation Writing

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is increasingly used as a pedagogical assistant in online learning; yet how young students, such as secondary school students, enact epistemic agency (EA) when learning with GAI remains underexplored. In this study, we examined the types and levels of EA demonstrated by secondary school students with scaffolded GAI and investigated the relation among students’ prior academic proficiency, self-efficacy in learning, and EA demonstrated. Participants were 122 seventh graders who engaged in an online bilingual inquiry unit on photosynthesis. The unit supports students in Taiwan in learning science inquiry and English as a foreign language, with GAI prompted and integrated to support students’ scientific explanation writing in English. Data collected and analyzed included students’ prior academic proficiency through assessments, self-efficacy in learning through questionnaires, and student–GAI conversation turns through textual conversation logs. Results identified seven types of student–GAI shared epistemic agency (SEA), with over 80% of students demonstrating such agency at least once. Correlation results indicated that the frequency of EA demonstrated by students was associated with their prior language proficiency. Cluster analysis with the retained four-profile solution further suggested that student–GAI SEA was likely to be activity-specific. The identified SEA categories provide a framework for examining student–GAI SEA, and the instruction design illustrates how GAI can be prompted to preserve opportunities for student contribution. Design implications for supporting students with different needs are discussed.