Cultivating Critical AI Literacy Through a Critical Thinking-Oriented Flipped Classroom: Implications for Sustainable Higher Education

Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in education and society, cultivating critical AI literacy has become a key objective of sustainable higher education, enabling learners to engage with AI responsibly, critically, and throughout lifelong learning. However, empirical evidence on how innovative pedagogical approaches foster critical AI literacy remains limited. This quasi-experimental study evaluated a critical thinking-oriented flipped instructional model in an AI general education course. Following data screening, the final analytic sample consisted of 82 undergraduate students (53 in the Experimental Group and 29 in the Control Group). Closely aligned pretest and posttest forms assessed critical AI literacy across knowledge, skill, and attitude dimensions. Between-group gain-score comparisons showed that the Experimental Group demonstrated greater improvement in overall critical AI literacy than the Control Group (Cohen’s d = 1.12, 95% CI [0.63, 1.60]). Greater gains were also observed for knowledge (d = 0.54), skill (d = 0.84), and attitude (d = 1.21), with the standardized between-group difference descriptively largest for attitude. These findings suggest that the critical thinking-oriented flipped instructional model is a promising approach for cultivating critical AI literacy in higher education and may have broader implications for sustainable higher education.