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Seeking online bilingual scientific information is a key aspect of bilingual scientific Web literacy – abilities to engage critically with science on the Web using two languages. This study aims to determine whether factors such as age, education major, gender and type of school attended at secondary level (monolingual, bilingual, trilingual) influence undergraduates’ ability to search online Spanish-English bilingual scientific information.

The participants in this study were 60 students (43 females and 17 males, 18–25 years old) enrolled in a university bilingual science course at a high-ranked Colombian university. They were asked to complete two tasks in which they had to seek online scientific information in Spanish and in English and post their responses on the Web application, Padlet^® (padlet.com).

Results indicate that students’ gender and age influence their academic performance in both tasks and level of originality in using information obtained via the Web, respectively. Moreover, the “scientific journal” was the top source of online information from which participants sought most information to complete both tasks.

People are becoming increasingly accustomed to seeking and sharing online scientific information to support points of view and make decisions. However, it is not known which factors influence students’ ability to seek online first language-English bilingual scientific information in countries where English is the second or foreign language.

In November 2022, the commercial company, OpenAI, launched ChatGPT. Since then, university students have rapidly become regular users of this artificial intelligence (AI) platform. One reason for this is the powerful capability of this generative AI tool to produce textual content, which in many cases, is almost indistinguishable from human-generated content. Another reason is that ChatGPT easily gives anyone access to knowledge. However, there is a problem as the vast majority of its users have no idea how this AI platform works and thus overlook the importance of thinking critically about information communicated in ChatGPT. While some call for banning this generative AI tool, this study aims to provide evidence that science classrooms can become scenarios where students find explicit, concrete, and realistic opportunities to critically evaluate scientific information generated by ChatGPT.

An intervention study was conducted with 55 students (26 females and 29 males, 17–24 years old) during a university Spanish-English bilingual science course taught within an active learning environment. The data consist of the written critiques of the students about Spanish-English bilingual scientific texts produced by ChatGPT.

Results indicate that the intervention had a positive effect on students’ abilities to construct sound arguments in Spanish and in English while judging the quality of scientific texts produced by this AI bot. Moreover, the findings suggest that the intervention enriched students’ skills to make improvements to texts produced by this generative AI tool.

The evidence provided in this study contributes to the exploration of possibilities to help students become critical users of ChatGPT.