Will Rural Students Be Left Behind? AI Literacy, Digital Access, and Future Skills Readiness among Secondary School Students in Ziarat District, Balochistan

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) influences the learning processes, communication, further education, and career prospects of secondary-school students in various ways. Nevertheless, inequalities related to the provision of digital resources may hamper the development of AI literacy and future readiness of the learners, especially in rural contexts. The current research examines the connections among digital access, AI literacy, school support, and future-skills readiness of 500 Grade 9 and 10 students in Ziarat District, Balochistan, evenly split by gender. The data collection procedure was carried out using a structured questionnaire with 34 scale items. The descriptive statistics, Cronbach's alpha, Pearson correlations, and multiple linear regression were used in the data analysis process. The mean scores were 3.15 for digital access, 3.10 for AI literacy, 2.94 for school support, and 3.09 for future-skills readiness. Internal consistency turned out to be high for AI literacy (α = .91), school support (α = .85), and future-skills readiness (α = .92), whereas relatively low for digital access (α = .35). The regression model predicts 27.8% of variance in future-skills readiness, F(5, 494) = 38.00, p < .001, with digital access, AI literacy, school support, gender, and grade as predictors. The supplied dataset was designed to analyze instead of being collected as real-life data, thus, the results should be viewed as illustrative instead of empirical evidence.