When considering this question, we first need to look at the best methods that can enhance student learning and see how using these AI tools can serve or hinder that purpose.
The process of learning starts with a basic awareness of our environment, proceeds to rote memory, working (short term) memory, patterning and connections to relational memory and long-term memory storage. In rote memory, we try to remember facts that we eventually forget. In most cases, these facts lack context or any form of pattern or connectivity that the brain can use to map the information into contextualized clusters. In working or short-term memory, the brain is capable of holding and manipulating information for only about 20 minutes. If we fail to move these working memories into long-term memory within 20 minutes, the memory gets lost. We can retain the new information by activating our previously learned knowledge that relates to the new material. This prior knowledge exists in stored loops of brain cell connections. Effective teaching uses strategies to help students recognize patterns and then make the connections required to process the new working memories so they can travel into the brain’s long term storage areas.
ChatGPT or any similar AI tool completely eliminates rote learning because it provides well-formed answers to any user questions, thus removing the need for students to search for the precise information that answers their question and to formulate it as an essay. Here are several teaching methods based on neuroscience that will help you avoid the negative impact that tools like ChatGPT can have on learning.
Teaching Method1: Enhance Traditional Learning With Fact Checking
Why Do This: When helped by ChatGPT or a similar tool, they will get their information prepackaged and formatted. However, these tools can be wildly inaccurate and that is where learning for students still lies.
What Can You Do: have students write an essay about any subject and use ChatGPT or other AI tools to do it, but then have students fact check it and come up with a list of inaccuracies they found and an edited version of the essay with the accurate information in mind.
Why Does This Work: By having to check the facts, students delve deep into their topic and conduct a compare and contrast between the content provided by the AI tool and what they come up with during their search. To accomplish this goal, students need to activate their executive faculties, facilitating the storage of data into long-term memory.
Teaching Method2: Personalize Information to Be Learned
Why Do This: Neuroscientists believe that personalizing information to be learned activates the areas of the brain that help form memories. AI tools such as ChatGPT can provide users with information, but they cannot say anything about how that information relates to each of us.
What Can You Do: Having students discuss a topic while relating it to students’ personal experiences is unique to each student and cannot be done by AI.
Why Does This Work: Personalizing and interacting with the information stimulates multiple brain pathways to enter long term memory and it cannot be done by any AI tool.
Teaching Method3: The Surprise Factor
Why Do This: Our brains are structured to remember novel events that are unexpected. Use surprise to bring student’s brains to attention.
What Can You Do: Strategies that can achieve these goals include partner discussions and Think-Pair-Share, or students’ reaction to what they learned and what their response is to it. What did I learn? What surprised me? What do I want to know more about? What did this information remind me of?
Why Does This Work: Students can use AI tools to do the research, but then need to do the discussion, Think-Pair-Share or any other surprising methods on their own.
Teaching Method4: Bring Assignments to Life
Why Do This: Instead of assigning questions that students need to answer by searching the chapter or their notes for the answers.
What Can You Do: Create classroom opportunities to bring these questions to life, by having students interview a partner as if for a television news show, create a presentation, read the notes of partners and advise them on what they missed, etc.
Why Does This Work: When information is passed from awareness to working memory, our brain can take over and build upon their existing knowledge.
Teaching Method5: Experiential Learning
Why Do This: When students engage in experiential learning such as hands-on discovery, it stimulates their senses and helps the memory to be stored in long-term memory.
What Can You Do: Have students focus on a topic that has both factual, episodic and event memories, such as the sensory input from touching, seeing, measuring and investigating.
Why Does This Work: It provides experiences that enable students to interact with knowledge in ways that triggers their physical senses and positive emotions or connects the new information with their past experiences and interests. AI tools can only provide the factual information, students need to perform the episodic or event parts on their own. So, when tying the factual to the episodic, students need to provide their own narrative about what they have experienced.