Since its release in late November 2022, ChatGPT has been a valuable tool for students worldwide, including many students and teachers in AISB. It can generate dialogue and provide complete and accurate responses. It is a very effective tool but also raises concerns about learning and ethics.
When it’s used to avoid school work rather than engaging students in their education, it’s not just teachers who get worried that students don’t know how to use it ethically.
Some schools around the world have banned ChatGPT and left it open for only teachers to use. If students don’t use this tool ethically, then schools will have to find solutions for students to avoid using it. For example, students may be asked to do more and more assignments on paper.
Based on a survey conducted by The Bite, many students in our school do use ChatGPT to help them with their school work, and because we never got taught how to use it, students don’t know what they should or should not ask ChatGPT to do.
How Students at AISB Currently Use ChatGPT and AI
Based on survey data and information on students in AISB secondary school, many of them have reported that they use ChatGPT to help them with their school work.
Grade 8 student Andy C. says, “When I do my homework, if I don’t understand some vocabulary words, I often ask about it, but not to complete my homework.”
In the survey sent to Secondary students, many students answered that they utilize ChatGPT. Some students may ethically use ChatGPT, but some don’t know how to utilize it effectively, and there are many other ways to use it instead of cheating.
The survey also asked students, “How or why do you typically use ChatGPT?” Students responded with:
- “Clarify or summarize confusing concepts”
- “When I don’t understand a question and I ask it to explain it easily”
- “I use it to quickly explain topics, to answer specific questions from worksheets, to give explanations for answers, to summarize articles or videos, and to create practice questions.”
- “To gather ideas, critique my ideas, rephrase things, help with math problems, explain things”
Students walk a fine line with using this tool.
The Open University Australia, like most accredited schools and universities, says that students asking ChatGPT to write an assignment for them is considered plagiarism. It also cautions that “OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has been upfront about the fact that ChatGPT’s answers aren’t always accurate. Sometimes, the chatbot straight up lies.”
Think Smart, an IB tutoring site, says, “The IB has come out to establish that it does not forbid students from using ChatGPT, but it promotes its ethical use,” including accurately citing its use within academic documents as a student should do for all their sources.
Schools and universities now frequently use a plagiarism checker and an AI detector to ensure students’ writing is original, including AISB. Here, the plagiarism and AI detector TurnItIn is embedded into the documents on Toddle that AISB students use to submit their work.
One misconception is that it is OK if only a few short sections of a paper are generated by AI, but even a small instance of plagiarism calls the student’s entire work into question.
How Can Students Use ChatGPT to Help with Schoolwork?
There are many ways that students could use ChatGPT in a way that doesn’t do all their work but instead helps them get a better understanding of their tasks and improves their education.
Humanities teacher David Starzynski weighs in with his thoughts on ChatGPT: “A good way to use [ChatGPT] is by what [students] input into it, so that the output of what they get is more representative of their ideas and their thoughts, and not just generic information that ChatGPT is scanning from the web.”
When asked how AI can best be used within lessons in the survey, students in the Bite survey suggested the following:
- “Teachers can advise us to use ChatGPT for gathering ideas and brainstorming”
- “When you don’t understand the topic that your teacher is trying to explain to you, you can just continuously ask ChatGPT questions until you understand – it’s like a free digital tutor.”
- “Generating questions (IB style) for students.”
- “Having teachers explain when it could be beneficial to use it and let students know when it’s okay”
According to Learning.com, a few ways that students could use ChatGPT to its full advantage instead of making it do the work include:
- Encouraging Creativity and Problem-Solving
ChatGPT can help boost creativity by helping capture students’ attention with innovative writing exercises and brainstorming sessions. For example, it assists students with problem-solving by designing tests or establishing solutions for real-world problems by stating what they are learning and asking ChatGPT to give them problems.
- Strengthening Language Learning and Communication
Many students struggle with communication and ChatGPT and support language learning, communication, and the ability to understand by providing interactive language practice. It can help with engaging them in communication exercises to help students improve on foreign language skills. For example, it formulates real-life conversations and can provide them with immediate feedback.
- Enhancing Critical Thinking
ChatGPT can help increase critical thinking by engaging students in discussions and activities for developing their problem-solving, decision-making, and understanding of complex concept skills. It can facilitate debates where students can convey their thoughts and viewpoints, analyze opposing arguments, and defend their points.
- Supporting Diverse Learners and EAL Students
It addresses diverse learning needs in classrooms and it delivers personalized learning for students with special educational needs. It does this by providing vocabulary support and cultural context.
The Negative Aspects Of ChatGPT
Although ChatGPT has a lot of positive features, we also need to be aware of its negative side. Because ChatGPT has only been around for a while, we have not yet seen the long-term effects of how this can negatively impact students’ knowledge and skill development if they rely on ChatGPT to do everything for them.
According to SEO Power Solutions, the negative aspects of ChatGPT itself are:
- Information Inaccuracy
ChatGPT isn’t always going to give the correct answers because some things could be wrong or out of date because it relies on past data. It is always important to double-check what answers you are getting from ChatGPT because when asking a broad question, it will also give a general answer.
- ChatGPT is Highly Literal
A portion of human communication is to be able to read between the lines and to find a deeper meaning. ChatGPT is not able to do this because it takes every question and input it gets. This is also a reason why it might give people wrong answers to questions when expected to find hidden messages.
- ChatGPT is Overly Unbiased
ChatGPT stays neutral and it doesn’t pick sides when asking for information. While this may sound like it is a good thing, it is ineffective when needing clear answers.
- Overdependence
ChatGPT can make people depend too much on AI to solve their problems or to make their own decisions. Since students have been using ChatGPT at a younger age, when they finally grow up and have to do tasks by themselves, they will struggle because they are used to ChatGPT doing everything for them.
When reaching out to teachers about why some students feel the need to use ChatGPT, EAL teacher Sebastian Olivares Lizana says how “there is a tendency to ask ChatGPT because it sounds nice, but it is machine-generated, and is not human.”
How Should Students Approach ChatGPT?
While ChatGPT may be a very resourceful tool, students need to be careful with how they use it and not depend too much on it. The purpose of school is to learn and to be educated. When using ChatGPT, if students straight up ask the answers for a task, they will never learn properly how to do said task.
It is important to be aware of what we are asking ChatGPT to do for us and that we aren’t just using it to do our work. There are many ways to utilize ChatGPT to its full purpose and potential properly, and so we as students could get a better understanding of topics that we are learning in school by asking ChatGPT to help us comprehend what we are doing in school.
Also, ChatGPT can give feedback on what to fix, and instead of making it rewrite everything for students, it should help to make their work better and to get students to reflect on their work.
Here is a short video produced by AISB’s Digital Technology team that may help suggest other ways for students and teachers at AISB to use AI:
It is really interesting to learn about the negative aspects of ChatGPT!!!