Teachers are asking students to use ChatGPT to generate text on a topic and then getting them to point out the flaws. In one example that a colleague of Stansbury’s shared at her workshop, students used the bot to generate an essay about the history of the printing press. When its US-centric response included no information about the origins of print in Europe or China, the teacher used that as the starting point for a conversation about bias. “It’s a great way to focus on media literacy,” says Stansbury.
Crompton is working on a study of ways that chatbots can improve teaching. She runs off a list of potential applications she’s excited about, from generating test questions to summarizing information for students with different reading levels to helping with time-consuming administrative tasks such as drafting emails to colleagues and parents.
One of her favorite uses of the technology is to bring more interactivity into the classroom. Teaching methods that get students to be creative, to role-play, or to think critically lead to a deeper kind of learning than rote memorization, she says. ChatGPT can play the role of a debate opponent and generate counterarguments to a student’s positions, for example. By exposing students to an endless supply of opposing viewpoints, chatbots could help them look for weak points in their own thinking.
Crompton also notes that if English is not a student’s first language, chatbots can be a big help in drafting text or paraphrasing existing documents, doing a lot to level the playing field. Chatbots also serve students who have specific learning needs, too. Ask ChatGPT to explain Newton’s laws of motion to a student who learns better with images rather than words, for example, and it will generate an explanation that features balls rolling on a table.
Made-to-measure learning
All students can benefit from personalized teaching materials, says Culatta, because everybody has different learning preferences. Teachers might prepare a few different versions of their teaching materials to cover a range of students’ needs. Culatta thinks that chatbots could generate personalized material for 50 or 100 students and make bespoke tutors the norm. “I think in five years the idea of a tool that gives us information that was written for somebody else is going to feel really strange,” he says.
Some ed-tech companies are already doing this. In March, Quizlet updated its app with a feature called Q-Chat, built using ChatGPT, that tailors material to each user’s needs. The app adjusts the difficulty of the questions according to how well students know the material they’re studying and how they prefer to learn. “Q-Chat provides our students with an experience similar to a one-on-one tutor,” says Quizlet’s CEO, Lex Bayer.
In fact, some educators think future textbooks could be bundled with chatbots trained on their contents. Students would have a conversation with the bot about the book’s contents as well as (or instead of) reading it. The chatbot could generate personalized quizzes to coach students on topics they understand less well.
Not all these approaches will be instantly successful, of course. Donahoe and her students came up with guidelines for using ChatGPT together, but “it may be that we get to the end of this class and I think this absolutely did not work,” she says. “This is still an ongoing experiment.”