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ChatGPT �&

Education

Designed by Torrey Trust, Ph.D.

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College of Education

University of Massachusetts Amherst

@torreytrust

This work is licensed under CC BY NC 4.0, meaning that you can freely use, remix, and share it as long as you give attribution and do not use it for commercial purposes.

NOTE: This slide deck is a work in progress and will continue to be updated as new ChatGPT resources, research, and ideas are published.

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Table of Contents

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What is ChatGPT?

An artificial intelligence (AI) tool that uses natural language processing techniques to respond to user-generated prompts.

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Put simply: You ask ChatGPT a question or provide a prompt, it replies using natural language.

Screenshot of ChatGPT prompt and response.

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What is ChatGPT?

Can you tell the difference between text written by a fourth grader and text written by ChatGPT?

Try out the New York Times quiz “Did a Fourth Grader Write This? Or the New Chatbot?”

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What is ChatGPT?

Can you tell the difference between text written by a college student and text written by ChatGPT?

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What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?

  • OpenAI (the company that designed ChatGPT) collects a lot of data from ChatGPT users.
    • The privacy policy states that this data can be shared with third-party vendors, law enforcement, affiliates, and other users.
    • This tool should not be used by children under 13 (data collection from children under 13 violates the United States’ Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule - COPPA).
    • The Terms of Use (End-User License Agreement) state that “you must be 18 years or older and able to form a binding contract with OpenAI to use the Services” (OpenAI, 2022, para. 2). This means that students under 18 years old should not be asked to sign up to use the tool.
    • While you can request to have your ChatGPT account deleted, the prompts that you input into ChatGPT cannot be deleted. If you, or your students, were to ask ChatGPT about sensitive or controversial topics, this data cannot be removed.

TIP: Before asking your students to use ChatGPT (if you plan to do so), please read over the privacy policy and terms of use with them and allow them to opt out if they do not feel comfortable having their data collected and shared as outlined in the policies.

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What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?

  • ChatGPT is not always trustworthy.
    • ChatGPT was trained using a massive dataset of text written by humans that was pulled from the Internet.
    • Thus, the responses can reflect the biases of the humans who wrote the text used in the training dataset.
    • ChatGPT is not connected to the Internet and the data used to train it was collected prior to 2021.
      • According to the FAQs, ChatGPT “has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021 and may also occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content” (Natalie, para. 4).

Screenshot of ChatGPT FAQ page.

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What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?

  • ChatGPT makes stuff up!
    • To make up for knowledge gaps (e.g., lack of training data to pull information from), ChatGPT will provide a response to the best of its ability (often made up) rather than say “error” or “cannot compute.”
    • See “How to Talk to ChatGPT, the Uncanny New AI-Fueled Chatbot That Makes a Lot of Stuff Up” (Ropek, 2022).

EXAMPLE: ChatGPT provided the APA reference list below for a prompt about professional learning networks (PLNs). The first and last citations are NOT real articles (they do not exist!). The middle two are real articles (but not actually related to PLNs).

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What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?

  • Asking students to use ChatGPT provides free labor to OpenAI.
  • ChatGPT is in its infancy. It will continue to become a more intelligent form of artificial intelligence…with the help of users who provide feedback to the responses it generates.
  • Do you really want to ask your students to help train an AI tool as part of their education?
  • Make sure to read: ChatGPT and Good Intentions in Higher Ed by Autumm Caines.

Screenshot of ChatGPT FAQ page.

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What can ChatGPT do?

  • Write essays.

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What can ChatGPT do?

  • Write lesson plans.

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What can ChatGPT do?

  • Design an outline for a class syllabus.

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What can ChatGPT do?

  • Write learning objectives.

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What can ChatGPT do?

  • Design quiz/test questions.

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What can ChatGPT do?

  • Write a script for a podcast or video.

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What can ChatGPT do?

  • Design a rubric.

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What can ChatGPT do?

  • Provide directions for a learning activity.

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What can ChatGPT do?

  • Write emails to students.

TIP: Do NOT provide a student’s full name and associated class grade to ChatGPT to write emails, this is a potential FERPA violation (in the United States) for sharing a student’s educational record (with OpenAI) without their permission.

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What else can ChatGPT do?

  • Design (and attempts to solve) math and science word problems.
  • Role play class scenarios.
  • Remix student work.
  • Provide writing examples.
  • Give students feedback on their writing.
  • Provide tips on how to personalize/differentiate learning.
  • Generate discussion prompts for class.
  • Provide one-on-one tutoring or coaching.
  • Write letters to parents (K-12 teachers) or students.

*These ideas and more from this Twitter thread by Robert Petitto, this Twitter thread by Matt Miller, and Ditch That Textbook.

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What can ChatGPT NOT do? (Yet)

  • Write a self-reflection (e.g., “describe how the content we covered in class last week shifted your thinking about your role as a current/future teacher”).
  • Write about anything that happened after 2021.
  • Provide non-text based responses (e.g., “design an infographic, interactive Google map, TikTok-style video, meme, multimodal timeline”).
    • Note: ChatGPT can still help with writing a script for a podcast or video or crafting the text to go in an infographic, meme, poster, timeline, etc…

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What can ChatGPT NOT do? (Yet)

  • Make predictions about future events.
  • Browse or summarize content from the Internet.
  • Draw connections between class content and visual materials.

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What can Educators Do?

Before you panic and consider banning technology from your classroom in favor of handwritten essays and oral exams (not that there’s anything wrong with those methods, but they might lead to more student anxiety)…consider how this tool might help you rethink teaching and learning.

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Instead, you might…

  • Update your syllabus.

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  • Talk with students about academic integrity.
    • Students often gloss over the boilerplate “academic integrity” statement in a syllabus. Update it to include AI tools. Update it to be more student-centered (see Zinn 2021 template). Bring it up in class. Talk about why academic integrity is essential to students (Hint: Don’t just focus on extrinsic motivators like their grades).

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What can Educators Do?

  • Redesign your assignments.
  • Encourage risk-taking, productive struggle, and learning from failure.
    • Students can learn more from failure than success (Ofgang, 2021), but far too often, when students fail, they are not given an opportunity to learn from their failure (e.g., revise and resubmit, retake a quiz).
    • When failure is the end result, rather than part of the learning process, students may be more likely to turn to tools like AI to cheat.

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What can Educators Do?

  • Be transparent about assignments.
  • Reconsider your approach to grading.
    • “Research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the learning itself” (Kohn, 2006, para. 4).
    • Try ungrading. Learn more from Jesse Stommel.
  • Shift from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation.
    • Students are more likely to cheat when “the class reinforces extrinsic (i.e., grades), not intrinsic (i.e. learning), goals.” (UC San Diego, 2020, para. 6).
    • Consider how you might increase intrinsic motivation by giving students autonomy, independence, freedom, opportunities to learn through play, and/or activities that pique their interest based on their experiences and cultures. Learn more about motivational theories in education from Dr. Jackie Gerstein.

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What can Educators Do?

  • Use ChatGPT as an educational tool.
    • NOTE: Before you ask students to use ChatGPT for an assignment, re-read this slide about privacy and data. The following suggestions are based on the teacher using ChatGPT to generate responses to share with students.
    • Engage students in critiquing and improving ChatGPT responses.
      • Pre-service teachers might critique how a ChatGPT lesson plan integrates technologies using the Triple E Rubric or examine whether it features learning activities that support diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion. (This will help future teachers learn to critique TPT resources! )
      • Computer science students might identify potential ways to revise ChatGPT generated code to reduce errors and improve output.
      • Middle school students might critically review the feedback ChatGPT provides on their writing and determine what is most helpful to their own learning.
      • High school and college students could analyze, provide feedback on, and even grade text produced by ChatGPT as a way to prepare for peer review of their classmates’ work.

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What can Educators Do?

  • Use ChatGPT as an educational tool (Cont’d).
    • Analyze how ChatGPT generates text for different audiences.
      • Ask ChatGPT to explain a concept for a 5 year old, college student, and expert. Analyze the difference in the way ChatGPT uses language.

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What can Educators Do?

  • Use ChatGPT as an educational tool (Cont’d).
    • Help students build their information literacy skills.
      • Ask students to conduct an Internet search to see if they can find the original sources of text used to generate a ChatGPT response.
    • Have students generate prompts for ChatGPT and compare and contrast the output.
      • Students could even design their own tool to evaluate the ChatGPT responses.
    • Ask ChatGPT to design a board game or invention related to the course content and then have students build a physical or digital model for the design/invention.
      • ChatGPT can’t build the inventions it comes up with (just yet!).

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Additional Resources

Curated Collections of Resources

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Additional Resources

Articles

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