Artificial Intelligence Literacy Among Students in Health-Related Academic Programs at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences: A Multidimensional Assessment
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Mina Mahami-Oskouei1, Vahideh Zarea Gavgani2, Hossein Hosseinifard3
1Department of Medical Library and Information Science, School of Management and Medical Informatics, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran.
Background:
The increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into higher education and health-related fields has increased the need to assess students' AI literacy across multiple dimensions.
Objective:
This study aimed to assess self-reported AI literacy among students enrolled in health-related programs at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences and to examine its associations with demographic and academic characteristics.
Methods:
This cross-sectional study was conducted among 132 undergraduate and postgraduate students at the Faculty of Management and Medical Informatics, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. A researcher-adapted questionnaire based on a previously validated four-dimensional AI literacy framework was used to assess knowledge, operational, critical, and ethical dimensions. To allow meaningful comparison across dimensions with different numbers of items, dimension scores were expressed as mean item scores on a 1-5 scale. Data were analyzed using independent-samples t-tests, one-way ANOVA, and a multivariable General Linear Model.
Results:
The overall mean AI literacy score was 3.18 (SD = 0.66) on a 1-5 scale. Among the four dimensions, the operational dimension had the highest mean item score (3.79), followed by the critical (3.52), knowledge (3.03), and ethical (2.49) dimensions. In bivariate analyses, differences in AI literacy were observed according to gender, age, and academic level. However, after multivariable adjustment, significant associations remained primarily for academic level with knowledge and operational scores and for age with the critical dimension, whereas no significant adjusted association was observed for the ethical dimension.
Conclusion:
Students demonstrated a moderate overall level of self-reported AI literacy, with substantial variation across dimensions. The relatively lower ethical literacy score indicates an area that may warrant further educational attention. However, the observed demographic differences should be interpreted cautiously because several bivariate associations were attenuated after adjustment and the study was based on self-reported data from a single institution.
