Generative AI is fundamentally changing how students find, evaluate, and use information. Its use, particularly its overuse, can affect the development of cognitive skills needed for successful research. For those of us who teach research, AI literacy is now a necessary part of that instruction.
These learning outcomes are broken into three areas, the first of which is foundational to understanding the others.
Understand AI
Learning outcomes
- Define different types of AI and related terms
- Identify different types of data able to be used by AI
- Identify at a basic level how GAI processes data to generate an output
- Analyze how the prompt shapes GAI output
- Recognize the importance of verifying GAI output
- Identify patterns of inaccuracy, oversimplification, and bias in AI-generated output
Related activities and assignments
- Identify common applications of AI in everyday life and the data they are trained on
- Compare information learned through GAI output to found information sources for a specific research question
- Evaluate GAI summaries of information sources
- Use documentation and other sources of information to determine how training data or design of specific tools could introduce bias
- Compare GAI output to prompts with varying details and levels of specificity
- Prompt GAI according to known biases and compare output across tools
Use GAI for research
Learning outcomes
- Identify how GAI can support various information tasks and acknowledge what tasks must be done without GAI
- Compare different GAI tools for their application and appropriateness for informational tasks
- Compose effective prompts for research in GAI
- Evaluate GAI output for accuracy, consistency, source reliability, and bias
- Identify when and how to cite GAI output
Related activities and assignments
- Practice using appropriate GAI tools for brainstorming, finding sources, organizing research, citation tracing, reviewing research writing, and understanding sources
- Locate and use documentation from GAI tools to understand tool functions, data used in training, and user requirements
- Compare outputs from iterative and varying prompts
- Compare sources found through retrieval-augmented GAI tools and traditional search tools and databases and evaluate affordances and limitations of each type of search
- Develop evaluation criteria for assessing GAI outputs
- Identify when and how GAI can be used for a specific research project
Reflect on AI’s impact
Learning outcomes
- Identify ways GAI can support or weaken cognitive abilities used in research such as synthesis, summarization, evaluation, and reading comprehension
- Recognize how AI fuels new avenues for scholarship
- Recognize how AI can perpetuate inequalities, biases, and misinformation
- Recognize the environmental impacts of GAI tools
- Recognize the impact of GAI on information creators and the information environment
- Recognize the pitfalls of personal privacy in using GAI
- Develop personal practices in the critical and ethical use of GAI such as acknowledging usage of AI and taking full responsibility for any AI-generated content in your writing
Related activities and assignments
- Reflect on personal AI use habits and impact on reading and thinking
- Reflect on how AI helped or hurt a research project
- Review research on the impact of GAI use on critical thinking and reading
- Reflect on what is lost and gained in using GAI as an information tool as opposed to traditional information sourcing
- Review case studies of AI applications that led to errors, misrepresentation, inequity, or degrading of the information environment
- Review scholarly research made possible or enhanced by AI applications
