In last month’s blog post, we outlined the challenges that ChatGPT presents for assessment, or how it can support cheating without getting caught. In this month’s post, we’ll explore how chatbot AI can enhance the educational experience. And it can.
The Brookings Institution suggests that “[u]sed in the right way, ChatGPT can be a friend to the classroom and an amazing tool for our students, not something to be feared.” They analogize chatbot AI to calculators. The calculator does the routine math processing, while the student has to know which processing to ask the calculator to do and how to interpret the results. Similarly, in a writing exercise, ChatGPT can collate all the relevant background information; but the student still needs to do the synthesis and know which information to ask for. And the students can exercise their editing skills to make the ChatGPT-generated draft an A+ paper.
UCLA law professor John Villasenor is encouraging his students to generate first drafts of his assignments using ChatGPT, and teaching them to use the draft report or brief ethically. “To remain competitive throughout their careers, students need to learn how to prompt an AI writing tool to elicit worthwhile output and know how to evaluate its quality, accuracy and originality.” He still plans to hold his students to the usual academic and honor code standards (accurate facts, well-organized text, no plagiarism), but helps them learn to use chatbot AI as a valuable research tool.
Most of the concern about ChatGPT has come from academics in the humanities, where a written work product is the usual basis of assessment. Some academics in more technical fields are institutionalizing the calculator analogy and allowing students to use chatbot AI to do the mundane calculations underlying more sophisticated analysis. Matthew Lang, an economics professor at University of California Riverside, says: “In a course like econometrics, where students are required to work with data throughout the course, ChatGPT can be particularly beneficial. It allows for a reduction in time spent on tedious tasks such as data loading and troubleshooting, which can be a source of frustration for students. This enables me as an educator to focus more on the critical analysis of empirical models, leading to a deeper understanding of the subject for my students.”
Some teachers have used ChatGPT as a tool to make their own lives easier. They’ve asked the chatbot to develop lesson plans or to draft quizzes. One creative use of the chatbot was to develop a class activity: “write a script for a ‘Friends’ episode that takes place at the Constitutional Convention.”
Chatbot AI is here to stay, both in education and in the real world after graduation. As teachers, let’s embrace it and use it to make our students ever more knowledgeable and accomplished. They may even ask ChatGPT to write you a thank you note!
