With the enormous growth of artificial intelligence, Allison Seitchik, an associate professor in psychology at Merrimack College, says it would be a disservice not to teach students how to use AI to benefit their education.
“I think we have to change how we teach and I fully embrace that,” said Seitchik. “These generations of students are brought up on social media and with information always at their fingertips. AI ramps it up. We as educators need to step forward and say, ‘You are going to use AI and that is great but here is what you need to know.’”
Seitchik made the pivot to AI research in the spring of 2023 as its prevalence in academia became more apparent. She was particularly struck by an op-ed she read in The New York Times by a college student who explained how their peers used AI as part of their studies.
“I already knew students were using it but then what I wanted to do was be able to teach my students how to use it ethically,” Seitchik noted.
Seitchik immersed herself in writings and courses about AI, as well as the programs themselves such as ChatGPT. She then crafted a manual, now available on Open Educational Resources Commons, to help students learn how to utilize AI for writing research papers. From there, she and fellow Merrimack College Professor Christina Hardway incorporated the manual, and the use of AI, in some of their courses.
Their findings included how AI helped to level the playing field between students who generally struggled with writing papers and those who didn’t, which is similar to past research findings.
“My guide focuses on a scaffolding writing process and taking students from ‘I have no idea what I want to do’ to the actual writing of the paper,” she said.
They also found that students relied on AI more heavily at the beginning of the writing process to help develop an idea or focus area. But once they knew what they wanted to write about they didn’t use AI as much. Many students were also hesitant about using AI for fear of plagiarism.
“We are teaching our students information literacy,” Seitchik said. “I remind my students that behind AI is a person developing the code and that person could be biased and the information the code is pulling from could be biased. Students have to check that the AI program they are using is correctly understanding the information it is pulling from.”
Seitchik noted that every time she has fed her own research papers into an AI program, it never correctly assessed the findings.
For her work, the Office of the Provost tapped Seitchik to be part of the first Harnessing Generative AI To Advance Learning faculty cohort in Merrimack College’s Teaching Excellence Advancement Challenge (TEACH) initiative. Seitchik was also part of the first cohort of the Strategic Academic Research Trajectory Package (START) program.
