Handouts are available below

Big Idea

I’ve read that AI has the potential to close achievement gaps for students. So, can ChatGPT help my students develop a deeper understanding of science material? Long story short, it can’t and I’ll share what I did to come to this conclusion and what needs to be done to use ChatGPT in a way that does lead to deeper learning.

Episode Notes

So what did I learn and what we can do as teachers when we use ChatGPT with students:

1. Teachers need to discuss and unpack ideas brought up by ChatGPT if we want students to develop a deeper understanding of content knowledge. ChatGPT is a jumping off point. It’s like a very sophisticated search engine that can write a response to you. But the response is just knowledge – to help students unpack it, we need to give students something to do with that knowledge. This is what AI cannot do so far that teachers can.
2. When using ChatGPT, it needs to be goal oriented, not task oriented. When I made students use ChatGPT for an assignment, students were just concerned with completing the assignment and not the learning behind it. However, in a separate, informal exercise, I got students to ask ChatGPT to help them with one issue in physics class and to share their conversation with me. The conversations were amazing. Some students asked questions and follow up questions about how to perform force calculations. Others asked for help on building their balloon powered car, which was the class project at the time. Again, students asked follow up questions, one after another. Thus, when students have a goal in mind – and not just a task to finish – the use of ChatGPT can help students dive deeper.  

Thanks for watching, and let’s talk science education again soon.

Resources

Handout(s): Ep68 Handouts – Using ChatGPT for Deeper Science Learning

Our resources are free. We aren’t collecting emails for our resources. However, it would help us out if you liked us on our Facebook page and subscribed to our Youtube Channel. Thanks!