Training and Opportunities
Asynchronous Session
Helping College Students Make Sense of ChatGPT : Generative AI as a Tool or Trap in the Writing Classroom? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Melanie Nichole Burdick
This paper describes a writing assignment for an advanced composition course in which students were asked to analyze an essay generated by Chat GPT. The course, for junior-and senior-level college students, includes curriculum that is focused upon writing within the various academic disciplines and understanding the formal and stylistic conventions of different disciplines’ genres. This was the first essay in an assignment sequence and purposefully engaged ChatGPT to allow for class conversations about this tool before they began writing and researching other topics in the class. The assignment asked students to analyze an essay created by ChatGPT and compare it to human-generated essays written about the same topic. Students found that the ChatGPT-generated texts were easier to read and understand, but that was mainly because they were more simplistic and superficial. Students described the human-generated texts as longer and more complex. They claimed that the human-generated texts dealt with more intricate reasoning and ambiguities. Students also reported that the human-generated texts provided more high-interest examples and source material to support their authors’ claims. This assignment not only began a conversation in the course about strengths and weaknesses of machine-generated texts, but it also allowed the instructor to understand students’ perceptions of machine versus human generated writing. It allowed students to better understand and articulate what machine-generated writing can and cannot do and it helped them see why complexity in writing can help strengthen argument. These understandings were discussed later when students created their own argumentative research essays.
Featured Exploring Virtual Reality Inside Healthcare Curricula: UK College Educators and Student Experiences View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Laura Sheerman
Virtual reality (VR) presents opportunities for new pedagogical approaches in the classroom that can enhance student learning in healthcare qualifications. UK Further Education (FE) colleges aim to equip 16-18+ year-old students with the skills and knowledge required to enter the workplace. Exposing young students to a range of different experiences is a challenge in healthcare because of industry placement restrictions. VR has the potential to enrich health curricula through the provision of on-demand, safe, and close to life healthcare scenarios for use in the classroom. Reports of VR explorations in real-world classroom settings are scarce, but crucial to understanding practical and pedagogical implications. This mixed-methods case study reports the experiences of four educators and eleven students after a weekly exposure to VR over 4 weeks. Semi-structured interviews and in-class surveys were completed. Four themes are discussed: 1. Engagement; 2. Barriers to Learning; 3. Knowledge Consolidation and 4. Practical Preparation. Implications for the integration of VR in the classroom are highlighted from both perspectives. Compared with non-VR learning, students felt VR was engaging and authentic and helped create unique, effective learning experiences by connecting current and previous learning. Students also experienced adverse effects, challenges with orientation to hardware, and psychological discomfort.
Developmental Relationships that Foster Learning Transfer at Work View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tessa Forshaw
This study explores the role of developmental relationships in facilitating learning transfer among working learners transitioning to new and novel role types. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 75 early to mid-career strategy consultants from two multinational consulting firms. Data was analyzed using abductive thematic analysis. Two main themes emerged: 1) Experienced others model transferring knowledge, learning, work products, and experiences to novel contexts, and 2) Experienced others intentionally promote active collaboration with their team members. The study highlights learning transfer as a sociocultural process fostered by developmental relationships within organizational contexts. It emphasizes the need to focus on the quality of these relationships in learning environments and developing managers as facilitators of learning transfer.
Exploring the Interface Between Text Type, (Meta) Cognitive Strategy Use and Reading Comprehension Outcomes among Moroccan EFL University Students View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mohammed Msaddek
This study aims at unearthing the conceived impact of text type (i.e., narrative, expository) on Moroccan EFL university learners’ use of cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies and reading comprehension gains in English (L3). It targeted 113 first-semester university students (Control Group (n=50); Experimental Group (n=63)). The obtained data were assembled by means of such instruments as reading comprehension tests (i.e., pre-test, post-test), comprehension texts (i.e., narrative, expository), and (meta) cognitive strategy intervention. The results revealed that, whilst the targeted subjects’ reading outcomes are not genre-dependent, their strategy use is influenced by the typology of the L3 written text being processed. Further, though reading strategy intervention improved the experimental group’s reading strategy application and reading scores, text genre impacted the usage of some cognitive and metacognitive reading heuristics. Hence, a wide plethora of viable implications related to reading comprehension instruction as well as a few limitations are put forth.
