FIRST YEAR BUSINESS STUDENTS’ USE OF AI: WHY AND WHY NOT��(ORIGINALLY “HOW AND WHY DOES ENCOURAGING STUDENTS TO USE AI TRANSLATE INTO ACTUAL USAGE?”)

Heidi Senior, Reference/Instruction Librarian

University of Portland​​

senior@up.edu

ABOUT UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND

• Private, Catholic, residential, ~3,300 students
• Undergraduate students mostly (98%) traditional age
• Business students are 15% of undergraduates

BUS 100

• One of the first courses in the UP Business School core
• “introduces students to essential leadership skills (team building, communication, and problem solving) within cultural and ethical frameworks.” (UP Bulletin, course catalog)
• First-time, first-year students in Fall semesters, mostly transfer students in Spring semesters

THE ASSIGNMENT

• Three pages, three sections
• Describe a leadership style (taken from a list)
• Provide two examples of when someone you admire used this style
• What aspects of this style interest you? List three things you will do to grow your leadership skills.

WHEN I STARTED KEEPING TRACK OF STUDENT AI USE

40%

Spring 2025

23%

Fall 2025

10%

Spring 2026

THE PREVIOUS SEMESTERS

34%

Fall 2023

47%

Spring 2024

34%

Fall 2024

RECORDED FROM �WORKS CITED PAGE

• Use of AI yes/no
• Name of tool
• Nature and wording of prompt

THE INTERVIEWS

• Recruited 8 students from Fall 2025; one from Spring 2026
• 13 Questions, based on Davis-Bibb (2025) and Vinyard & Roosa (2025)
• Recorded and transcribed via Android Recorder app, then corrected as needed
• Inductive, in vivo coding
• Filler words removed from quotes

THE STUDENTS

• 8 first-time, first year
• 1 transfer
• Three students who used AI and cited it; one who used AI and did not cite it

HOW LONG HAVE THEY BEEN USING AI?

• Five using for 1 year or less
• Since Senior year of high school
• One "Since Father's Day before I entered UP"
• Four using for more than 2 years
• Most since Junior year of high school
• One "Since either middle school or Freshman year of high school"

KNOWLEDGE OF HOW AI WORKS

• Mostly not aware
• More aware of impacts, especially environmental
• "Depends on the area, because I know a lot more about it in generative art, more so than generative information."

HOW OFTEN THEY USE AI

• Seven: At least weekly
• Ranges from daily to 1x weekly
• Two: Rarely
• "Only when assignments require it"
• "Trying to do things myself nowadays"

WHICH AI TOOLS DO STUDENTS USE?

Cited in the BUS 100 paper:

• ChatGPT (98%)
• Gemini (1%)
• Perplexity.ai (1%)

WHICH AI TOOLS DO STUDENTS USE? (2)

Mentioned in interviews:

• CoPilot
• Gauth
• Grammarly
• Pearson AI
• PhotoMath
• Quizlet

LEARNING TO WRITE PROMPTS

• Through trial and error
• Instruction is rare (n=2)
• They seem to understand what a useful prompt might look like
• "It's not hard to have conversation"
• "You have to be super specific"
• "Exact parameters"
• “…tell it ‘This type of sources’"

WHAT DO THEIR PROMPTS LOOK LIKE?

Average formatted as a question over the six semesters: 46%

• What are the impacts of laissez-faire style leadership on the work environment?
• How would you describe participative leadership to someone who wouldn’t know what it was about?
• Can you help me brainstorm the qualities that Princess Bernice Pauahi and King Kalākaua share when it comes to democratic leadership?
• What aspects of transformational leadership are interesting?

WHAT DO THEIR PROMPTS LOOK LIKE? (2)

Average formatted as an imperative: 13.5%

• Explain what servant leadership is
• Provide a description and explanation of a Laissez-Faire leader
• Describe LeBron James’ Leadership Style
• Summarize being a transformational leader
• Explain the Characteristics and Comparison of Autocratic, Democratic, Laissez-faire, and Visionary Leadership Styles

WHAT DO THEIR PROMPTS LOOK LIKE? (3)

The remainder (37%) were formatted as if the student

was using a search engine:

• Mike Krzyzewski Democratic Leadership Style
• list of transformational leaders
• Laissez-Faire Leadership Style
• Servant Leadership Style in Politics
• Emotional Intelligence in Leaders
• Visionary Leadership: A Comprehensive Overview

HOW PROMPTS COMPARE WITH OTHER STUDIES?

• Most studies examine student prompts thematically
• E.G., conversational component, Bloom’s taxonomy, student goal
• Trippas et al. (2024) found that 36% of respondents had a “’web search’ interaction style characterized by short queries” (based on word length).
• Basith & Tathahira (2025) found that 56% of prompts were interrogative, while 44% were imperative (in a small sample)

WHAT DO STUDENTS SAY THEY �USE AI FOR?

• Brainstorming
• Study guides
• Summarizing an article, a chapter, etc.
• Writing outlines

WHAT DO STUDENTS SAY THEY �USE AI FOR? (2)

• Asking it to review an assignment and rubric “to make sure I didn’t miss any boxes”
• To know what’s going on in the stock market
• To understand graphs in Microeconomics
• To understand German grammar

MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT CHATBOTS

• Always agrees with you
• It can’t guide you through understanding, will only give you an answer

HOW THEY PERCEIVE �OTHER STUDENTS’ USE

“…some people are relying so heavily on the AI to do the work for them.”

“My peers are just gonna ChatGPT all of their answers, and that's gonna make it like, less of a learning experience, I guess, for the group.”

“I've had friends and peers and classmates who use it to write a paper or, like, give them summaries on a book we're reading”

DO THEY PERCEIVE AI USE AS�PLAGIARISM OR ACADEMIC DISHONESTY?

• “It depends”
• “If you’re allowed, like in theology … to help understand the reading [that’s not academic dishonesty]”
• “In the classroom, I don't think AI should be used at all because there's a teacher right there, obviously people have questions and I think teachers should answer them. Outside the classroom, and if it's for studying, I think it is totally fair game.”

DO THEY PERCEIVE AI USE AS�PLAGIARISM OR ACADEMIC DISHONESTY? (2)

• If I sit down and I need three hours to understand a concept, realistically I'm not going to have enough time to ever actually learn it. And so, then, I just get stuck in like uncertainty. I think that sometimes ChatGPT…. Yes, it minimizes the amount of struggle that you have to learn, but I think it's just as genuine as a way of learning as long as you don't become lazy and just use it as a method to give you answers.

WHY THEY USED AI

• Misunderstood the assignment
• “I thought I had to use AI”
• “I thought we needed at least two sources, and then I didn’t get a good grade on [my first draft] because I only used two sources. So I quickly used AI because I didn’t have time at that point.”
• Concerned about having trouble finding sources
• “Last semester … I didn’t use AI, and I felt like it was kind of difficult to find the information that I wanted.”

​

​

WHY THEY USED AI AND DIDN’T CITE IT

• AI use perceived as unworthy of citation
• “I didn't use AI at all, really, just to… the only way I used it was to, ask them to define the leadership styles and give me examples so I knew, kind of, how to base it off of.”
• ​

WHY THEY DIDN’T USE IT, 1/3

• Mistrustful at being encouraged to use it
• “I was thinking, ‘Is this going to be get caught for or flagged for AI generation?’”
• “I didn't want my grade to be jeopardized.”
• Skeptical about AI
• “I knew that if I was to try and use AI, that it would most likely just give me false information..”

WHY THEY DIDN’T USE IT, 2/3

• It would have been too easy; the assignment was already easy
• “to use AI on that, it would have been so lazy, it would be unbelievable.”
• “we were given every single resource”
• “I don't need that because I found articles on my own”

​

​

​

WHY THEY DIDN’T USE IT, 3/3

• Self-development
• “I've improved so much by not using it as much as I did before.”
• “I'm just more confident in myself as a writer than to use AI on my writing.”
• Articles preferred
• “the exact same thing that AI would have told me I could have found in an article with the same amount of effort put into both’”

​

​

​

Gartner Hype Cycle

HOW MY TEACHING WILL/MIGHT CHANGE

• Show examples of how students have used AI, i.e., what basic prompts might look like
• Provide a framework for prompt development, such as CLARIFIES+ (Barrot, 2026), or demonstrate MS Copilot’s Prompt Coach.
• Including encouraging critique
• Include another citation example on the course LibGuide, in addition to ChatGPT

HOW MY TEACHING WILL/MIGHT CHANGE (2)

• Discuss potential bias in AI chatbots’ training
• Remind students to cite AI use, and how to cite it
• Encourage secondary citation
• Encourage careful AI-use decision making (Shotick, 2026)
• Share Artificial Intelligence Disclosure with professors (Weaver, 2024)

​

REFERENCES

Barrot, J. (2026). The CLARIFIES+ framework: A contextualized prompting approach for generative artificial intelligence. International Journal of TESOL Studies, 260215, 1-22. https://doi.org/10.58304/ijts.260215

Basith, R. I., & Tathahira. (2025). Prompting ChatGPT: A syntactic analysis of English education students’ queries at the university level. Journal of English Language Teaching, Linguistics and Literature, 5(2), 253. https://doi.org/10.47766/jetlee.v5i2.6503

Davis-Bibb, C. (2025). The impact of AI on learning: A qualitative study of student perceptions at the community college level. Practitioner to Practitioner, 14(2), 17-32.

Shotick, K. (2026). PEACEful use of AI: A tool for AI education. College & Research Libraries News, 87(6), 259-274.

REFERENCES (2)

Trippas, J. R., Al Lawati, S. F. D., Mackenzie, J., & Gallagher, L. (2024). What do users really ask large language models?: An initial log analysis of Google Bard interactions in the wild. Paper presented at the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR ’24). New York: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3626772.3657914

​

Vinyard, M., & Roosa, M. (2025). Student perspectives on using generative artificial intelligence for research: A qualitative approach. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 25(4), 729-752.

​

Weaver, K. D. (2024). The Artificial Intelligence Disclosure (AID) Framework: An introduction. College & Research Libraries News, 85(10), 407-430. (and https://aidframework.org/)

​

​