ArticleFrontiers in psychology2026
The association between generative AI use and university students' critical thinking: a moderated mediation model of GenAI feedback literacy and reflective thinking.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has rapidly become an everyday learning resource for university students, yet evidence on whether such use is associated with stronger or weaker critical thinking is sharply divided. Recent work documents both cognitive scaffolding and "metacognitive laziness" effects, suggesting that the AI-cognition relationship is contingent on how students engage with AI-generated feedback. Drawing on the extended-mind framework, cognitive load theory and feedback-literacy theory, we test a cross-sectional moderated mediation model in which GenAI feedback literacy mediates the association between GenAI use and critical thinking, operationalised as self-reported critical analytical skills, and reflective thinking moderates both the direct path and the path from feedback literacy to critical thinking. A sample of 421 Chinese undergraduates (69.6% female) completed validated self-report measures, and partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM, 5,000 bootstrap resamples) was used to estimate the model. GenAI use significantly predicted critical thinking (
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