A Comparative Study of Epistemological Beliefs and AI Chatbot Usage Among Early Adopters and Later Users in Higher Education

With the increasing integration of artificial intelligence in education, the relationship between students' learning strategies and their engagement with AI chatbots are of interest. This exploratory study examines the relationships between learning strategies, epistemological beliefs, and motivational orientations concerning AI chatbot usage, as well as the actual usage patterns among students, which has been identified as a research gap. Some studies show that especially India has a high usage of ChatGPT and other countries e. g. Germany how low usage rates. Thus, we operationalized Indian student as so-called early adopters and German students as later users to compare the two subgroups. The study consists of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{N = 1 3 5}$</tex> students from various disciplines across multiple German universities (<tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathrm{n}=91$</tex>; later users) and an Indian university (<tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathrm{n}=44$</tex>; early adopters). The findings indicate that students in subgroup 2 (Indian students) can be considered early adopters, utilizing AI chatbots more frequently and exhibiting less elaborated epistemological beliefs compared to later users. Early adopters perceive AI chatbots as a comprehensive source of knowledge. In contrast, later users reported less frequent use of AI chatbots. While no significant correlation was found between epistemological beliefs and learning strategies in relation to students' usage frequency, the differences in epistemological beliefs between the two subgroups suggest that frequent use of AI chatbots could potentially decrease students' epistemological sophistication and thus impact their learning strategies.