15 AI-Assisted Article Review Assignment (Human Development)
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Description of resource(s):
This is an assignment that encourages students to use AI tools as a collaborative resource to enhance their research work, their formal (APA) writing skills, and to actively engage in their own learning experience. Specifically, this assignment challenges students to compare their own skills (reading academic articles and writing a formal review/summary) to output that is generated by AI tools. The assignment forces students to critically analyze AI output and puts the focus squarely on learning to write a thorough, complete, and accurate article review by using the AI output as a learning resource to improve their own work.
Links to Resources:
Why I implemented this:
In my Research Methods course, students are tasked with being responsible consumers of information by critically reviewing the literature in the field of Human Development and Family Sciences. And as the use of AI continues to grow in popularity, we as educators are faced with finding ways to create innovative educational opportunities for our students, while also honoring academic integrity. Thus, I created an assignment to:
- Debunk any myths or fears around the use of AI as simply a violation of academic integrity rather than a learning tool
- Encourage students to see AI tools such as ChatGPT as potential collaborative resources that will help them build their research and writing skills
- Actively engage students in educational innovation as we move toward greater and more varied uses of AI tools in higher education
My main takeaways:
After reviewing results from the student feedback survey, I picked up on several themes. Below are the takeaway themes, followed by quotes from student participants:
- Students initially had a level of trepidation about using AI in university/classroom sanctioned work. Many associated the use of AI with violations of academic integrity.
“I was excited (about using AI in an assignment). I did not know I can do that so this was a pretty eye-opening experience for me.”
“This course and assignment has demonstrated how AI should be used in addition to creating my own work and not as a substitute. In comparing my own work to AI’s, I was able to clearly see how a human mind verse a robot process information and the advantages of both.”
- Students recognized that AI can be utilized as a learning tool to improve upon their own work.
“I feel like it (the assignment) helped me create better and more intricate ideas and thoughts. It helped me me bring in my ideas together in a more thorough way.”
“Comparing my review to the AI review did help me to create a more thorough review. AI generates very strong sentences and is good at distilling information and creating transition sentences so I was able to utilize those aspects of the AI review and implement it into my own.”
- Students found this assignment to be useful to them.
“This review and other assignments in this class and others involving ChatGPT this semester have benefited me. They have introduced me to LLMs and how to use them, but also their weaknesses. They have made me view them as more of a tool to use, yet also something that needs to be verified, just like the rest of the internet.”
“I found this assignment useful because I was able to see what AI could handle and how good it can articulate sentences that I did not know how to do before.”
- Students attitudes toward the use of AI in coursework is changing
“Before this semester, I had never used any of the generative AI tools because I did not want it to become an issue in school, so now that the tools are used in several of my classes, my views on them have definitely changed.”
“By having used AI in this class, I now feel more comfortable with using AI in general. I think it is a valuable tool to utilize to help with brainstorming and generating ideas for writing assignments.”
What else should I consider?
Preparing Students for AI: Because this is relatively new, I chose to introduce the use of AI tools in class in incremental steps. I gave preliminary assignments where I simply had students open ChatGPT and complete tasks such as a) “ask AI to provide the basic theories in the field of Human Development and select which one most speaks to you and why”; and b) use ChatGPT to explore topics of interest to you with prompts such as “Has there been significant research conducted on online relationships?” This will yield general information for students to decide whether you want to pursue this topic.” This allowed students who were not familiar with using AI in class (or at all) to warm up to the idea. These mini-assignments were followed by the one described above. We spent a total of approximately one hour of class time on this; and I estimate that students would spend about another hour outside of class working/completing all AI-related assignments.
Communication/Q&A: To make sure students had the ability to ask questions, get answers, and learn from one another, I set up a Discussion Board on the course canvas site that was open to all students in the class. Although I had only a few questions come through, all students saw my responses (and other students’ responses) and thought it was a good idea.
Potential Pitfalls: In addition to standard accessibility and computer literacy challenges to be aware of, the only potential pitfall has to do with the fact that this assignment has a cumulative aspect to it. This assignment can only be completed if students have successfully completed the first assignment, which requires them to read the assigned journal article and complete the article review themselves first. For this reason, I did two things:
- I placed emphasis on the importance of reading the article and completing their review;
- And I waited to publish and introduce this second part/follow-up ‘You vs. AI’ assignment until after they had completed the first assignment.
Preparing for and carrying out this assignment takes some time and organization on the instructor’s part, but well worth it.
