The associations between students' attitudes towards AI and learning engagement: Serial mediating roles of perceived autonomy and learning enjoyment

Michael Jonathan Reiss^1*Haiying Liang²

• ¹Institute of Education, University College London, London, United Kingdom
• ²School of Foreign Languages, Peking University, Beijing, China

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly integrated into higher education to provide real-time feedback and personalized learning support. While previous research has primarily examined the impact of AI attitudes on students' AI usage behavior, less is known about how students' attitudes toward AI influence their psychological experiences and learning behaviors. This study investigates the associations between students' attitudes toward AI and their learning engagement, focusing on the serial mediating roles of perceived autonomy and learning enjoyment. A questionnaire was administered to 425 university students. This study demonstrates the following findings: (1) A significant positive correlation exists between students' attitudes toward AI and their learning engagement. (2) Perceived autonomy mediates this relationship, with a notable mediation effect of 0.177. (3) Learning enjoyment also plays a mediating role in linking students' attitudes toward AI and their engagement in learning, with a significant and relatively strong mediating effect of 0.115. (4) A serial mediation effect involving both perceived autonomy and learning enjoyment is observed, with a smaller but still significant effect value of 0.021. Furthermore, the use of propensity score matching (PSM) helps control for self-selection bias, thereby enhancing the robustness of the findings. The findings offer empirical insights into the motivational and emotional mechanisms linking attitudes towards AI and engagement, thereby informing the design of AI-enhanced learning environments to support autonomy, enjoyment, and active participation.