This study qualitatively explored how elementary students’ visual literacy, metacognitive experiences, and agency/subjectivity expand and are reinforced in art appreciation classes using a generative AI image tool. Four sessions of AI-based art appr...
This study qualitatively explored how elementary students’ visual literacy, metacognitive experiences, and agency/subjectivity expand and are reinforced in art appreciation classes using a generative AI image tool. Four sessions of AI-based art appreciation (tool exploration, masterpiece re-creation, and free creation/critique) were conducted over four weeks with twelve 5th–6th graders. Elementary learners’ prompts, generated images, and utterances were collected and analyzed using frameworks including Feldman’s art criticism, Flavell’s metacognition theory, Bandura’s Human Agency, and Deci & Ryan’s self-determination theory.
Findings showed that elementary learners’ visual literacy expanded sequentially, from observation to meaning-making, deepened via the dual pathway of prompts (triggering description/analysis) and oral interaction (strengthening interpretation/evaluation). Second, metacognitive experiences were rapidly elicited by the immediate feedback between prompt and image, activating planning–monitoring–evaluation–regulation cycles. Third, generating and critiquing images mediated the shift to creative/critical agents, simultaneously promoting elementary learners’ agency (intentionality, forethought) and subjectivity (autonomy, competence, relatedness). This was fostered by the clear causal linkage between prompts and images and the tool’s low cost of failure, which encouraged repeated attempts and peer critique. Building on this, the study presents a diagrammatic interrelation of these factors in generative-AI-based elementary art appreciation.