Digital Literacy in Tutoring

Our students are using AI more than many teachers realize. They turn to ChatGPT to write essays, summarize readings, brainstorm ideas, translate text, you name it. It’s fast, fluent, and frictionless. For us as educators, how students use AI matters more than how often. If we want them to unlock its educational potential, we need to move beyond fear or blind adoption and start teaching with it, critically. Students need AI literacy. That means knowing how to: – Question what they’re given – Cross-check facts – Spot bias – Iterate better prompts – Transfer insights across tools and subjects In this new guide, I’m sharing hands-on ChatGPT activities you can use in class to help students engage more critically and creatively with AI. #AIinEducation #ChatGPT #CriticalThinking #EdTech #AIliteracy #MedKharbach #EducatorsTechnology

Institutions can educate their students about AI and assess their readiness to use it by running AI literacy programmes that feature general and specialised modules tailored to their areas of study and career aspirations. For instance, a business student may need to learn how to use AI-powered tools for data analysis while medical students will need to be well versed in using them to assist with medical diagnoses. A generic AI literacy programme could contain modules on the technical understanding of AI, especially machine learning and generative language models. Students must understand how the technology perceives the environment and collects and processes data. It can incorporate practical elements by requiring students to learn how to communicate effectively with AI models. This can involve teaching best practice prompt writing, followed by a prompt-writing task. We can also teach students to use AI tools to enhance productivity. For example, we can train them to use virtual assistants to set up calendar events and meetings, organise emails and generate to-do lists and transcripts of online meetings, put together effective presentations, create images from textual documents, analyse data, spot patterns and predict trends. https://lnkd.in/ejFZK48J

Latest research with Janice Zhang and Yifan Sun on the use of LLM for computer science education: The integration of AI assistants, especially through the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), into computer science education has sparked significant debate. An emerging body of work has looked into using LLMs in education, but few have examined the impacts of LLMs on students in entry-level programming courses, particularly in real-world contexts and over extended periods. To address this research gap, we conducted a semester-long, between-subjects study with 50 students using CodeTutor, an LLM-powered assistant developed by our research team. Our study results show that students who used CodeTutor (the experimental group) achieved statistically significant improvements in their final scores compared to peers who did not use the tool (the control group). Within the experimental group, those without prior experience with LLM-powered tools demonstrated significantly greater performance gain than their counterparts. We also found that students expressed positive feedback regarding CodeTutor's capability, though they also had concerns about CodeTutor's limited role in developing critical thinking skills. Over the semester, students' agreement with CodeTutor's suggestions decreased, with a growing preference for support from traditional human teaching assistants. Our analysis further reveals that the quality of user prompts was significantly correlated with CodeTutor's response effectiveness. Building upon our results, we discuss the implications of our findings for integrating Generative AI literacy into curricula to foster critical thinking skills and turn to examining the temporal dynamics of user engagement with LLM-powered tools. We further discuss the discrepancy between the anticipated functions of tools and students' actual capabilities, which sheds light on the need for tailored strategies to improve educational outcomes. https://lnkd.in/e_HYKbav