ChatGPT &
Education
Designed by Torrey Trust, Ph.D.
College of Education
University of Massachusetts Amherst
@torreytrust | torrey@umass.edu
This work is licensed under CC BY NC 4.0, meaning that you can freely use, remix, and share it as long as you give attribution and do not use it for commercial purposes.
NOTE: This slide deck is a work in progress and will continue to be updated as new ChatGPT resources, research, and ideas are published.
Published January 2023 | Updated April 2023
Table of Contents
What is ChatGPT?
What do you need to know about ChatGPT?
Privacy
Trustworthiness
ChatGPT makes stuff up!
Free labor
Assessment
Plagiarism Detectors
What can ChatGPT do?
What can ChatGPT NOT do? (yet)
What can Educators do?
Additional Resources
What is ChatGPT?
An artificial intelligence (AI) tool that uses natural language processing techniques to respond to user-generated prompts.
Put simply: You ask ChatGPT a question or provide a prompt, it replies using natural language.
Screenshot of ChatGPT prompt and response.
What is ChatGPT?
Can you tell the difference between text written by a fourth grader and text written by ChatGPT?
Try out the New York Times quiz “Did a Fourth Grader Write This? Or the New Chatbot?”
NOTE: This article might be behind a paywall. UMass Amherst students, staff, and faculty have free access to the New York Times.
What is ChatGPT?
Can you tell the difference between text written by a college student and text written by ChatGPT?
What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?
OpenAI (the company that designed ChatGPT) collects a lot of data from ChatGPT users.
The privacy policy states that this data can be shared with third-party vendors, law enforcement, affiliates, and other users.
This tool should not be used by children under 13 (data collection from children under 13 violates the United States’ Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule - COPPA).
The Terms of Use (End-User License Agreement) state that “You must be at least 13 years old to use the Services. If you are under 18, you must have your parent or legal guardian’s permission to use the Services” (OpenAI, 2022, para. 2).
While you can request to have your ChatGPT account deleted, the prompts that you input into ChatGPT cannot be deleted. If you, or your students, were to ask ChatGPT about sensitive or controversial topics, this data cannot be removed.
TIP: Before asking your students to use ChatGPT (if you plan to do so), please read over the privacy policy and terms of use with them and allow them to opt out if they do not feel comfortable having their data collected and shared as outlined in the policies.
What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?
What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is not always trustworthy.
ChatGPT was trained using a massive dataset of text written by humans that was pulled from the Internet.
Thus, the responses can reflect the biases of the humans who wrote the text used in the training dataset.
ChatGPT is not connected to the Internet and the data used to train it was collected prior to 2021.
According to the FAQs, ChatGPT “has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021 and may also occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content” (Natalie, para. 4).
Screenshot of ChatGPT FAQ page.
What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is not always trustworthy.
See the following articles:
What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?
ChatGPT makes stuff up!
To make up for knowledge gaps (e.g., lack of training data to pull information from), ChatGPT will provide a response to the best of its ability (often made up) rather than say “error” or “cannot compute.”
Read “Why ChatGPT and Bing Chat are so good at making things up” (Edwards, 2023).
EXAMPLE: ChatGPT provided the APA reference list below for a prompt about professional learning networks (PLNs). The first and last citations are NOT real articles (they do not exist!). The middle two are real articles (but not actually related to PLNs).
What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?
How/why does ChatGPT make up information? Check out this article to learn more.
What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?
How/why does ChatGPT make up citations? Check out this Twitter thread to learn more.
What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?
Asking students to use ChatGPT provides free labor to OpenAI.
ChatGPT is in its infancy. It will continue to be programmed as a more intelligent form of artificial intelligence…with the help of users who provide feedback to the responses it generates.
Do you really want to ask your students to help train an AI tool as part of their education?
Make sure to read: ChatGPT and Good Intentions in Higher Ed by Autumm Caines.
Screenshot of ChatGPT FAQ page.
What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?
OpenAI recommends against using ChatGPT for assessment purposes.
What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?
Plagiarism detectors for ChatGPT are not reliable!
Against the use of GPTZero and other LLM-output detection tools (Gegg-Harrison, 2023)
Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected? (Sadasivan and colleagues, 2023)
What do You Need to Know about ChatGPT?
Screenshot of ChatGPT interface from a mobile phone
You cannot delete your prior prompts/questions!
OpenAI is attempting to mitigate potential harms (i.e., what the people who trained the tool consider to be harmful).
Read: Analysis: ChatGPT is great at what it’s designed to do. You’re just using it wrong
ChatGPT is not connected to the Internet. If asked about events after 2021, it may tell you it cannot respond or it may make up an answer!
ChatGPT is in the “free research preview” stage. Meaning that your use of the tool is helping improve it…for free.
See example table on “Teaching Students to Write with AI: The SPACE Framework.”
What can ChatGPT do?
Write essays.
Explore this list of Sample AI-Generated Essays by Anna Mills (CC BY NC 4.0).
What can ChatGPT do?
Write poems in the style of a specific author.
What can ChatGPT do?
Write lesson plans.
What can ChatGPT do?
Design an outline for a class syllabus.
What can ChatGPT do?
Write policies for a class syllabus.
What can ChatGPT do?
Write learning objectives.
What can ChatGPT do?
Design quiz/test questions.
What can ChatGPT do?
Write a script for a podcast or video.
What can ChatGPT do?
Design a rubric.
What can ChatGPT do?
Provide directions for a learning activity.
What can ChatGPT do?
Act as a teachable agent. (Tate et al., 2023)
What can ChatGPT do?
Write emails to students.
TIP: Do NOT provide a student’s full name and associated class grade to ChatGPT to write emails, this is a potential FERPA violation (in the United States) for sharing a student’s educational record (with OpenAI) without their permission.
What can ChatGPT do?
Take notes on text that you insert into ChatGPT (e.g., a video/podcast transcript)
NOTE: There seems to be a limit on how much text you can insert into the ChatGPT text box (it was not able to read the full Sir Ken Robinson TED talk transcript).
What can ChatGPT do?
Provide a revised version of text with improved grammar and spelling.
What can ChatGPT do?
Write a text for students to read that is designed for a specific lexile level and includes specific vocabulary.
What can ChatGPT do?
Write choose-your-own-adventure stories.
What can ChatGPT do?
Generate examples to aid student learning. Check out The Cult of Pedagogy’s “How to Use ChatGPT as an Example Machine.”
What can ChatGPT do?
Generate role-playing scenarios and simulations.
Check out Bryan Alexander’s Experimenting with using ChatGPT as a simulation application.
What can ChatGPT do?
Here's a digital choice board that engages students in developing their critical media literacy skills as they interact with ChatGPT that specifically focuses on Black history (something that is often left out of U.S. curriculum/textbooks). Given ChatGPT’s potential for generating misinformation and biased information, these activities offer students a critical way to investigate how ChatGPT writes about Black lives and history, and potentially consider why this may be.
What can ChatGPT do?
Write many different things for K-12 teachers.
What can ChatGPT do?
Write many different things for higher ed faculty.
What else can ChatGPT do?
Design (and attempt to solve) math and science problems.
Identify potential misconceptions students might have about the content.
Remix student work.
Provide low-quality and high-quality writing examples.
Give students feedback on their writing.
Provide tips on how to personalize/differentiate learning.
Generate discussion prompts for class.
Provide one-on-one tutoring or coaching.
Write letters to parents (K-12 teachers) or students.
*These ideas and more from this Twitter thread by Robert Petitto, this Twitter thread by Matt Miller, Ditch That Textbook, and 5 Ways ChatGPT can help Primary Teachers by Marc Hayes.
Also, check out A Teacher's Prompt Guide to ChatGPT aligned with 'What Works Best' & Ms. Allyn’s video “9 ChatGPT Uses for K-12 Teachers to Make Their Lives Easier”
What can ChatGPT NOT do? (Yet)
Write a self-reflection (e.g., “describe how the content we covered in class last week shifted your thinking about your role as a current/future teacher”).
Provide non-text based responses (e.g., “design an infographic, interactive Google map, TikTok-style video, meme, multimodal timeline”).
Note: Google’s BARD can provide non-text based responses!
What can ChatGPT NOT do? (Yet)
What can Educators Do?
Before you panic and consider banning technology from your classroom in favor of handwritten essays and oral exams (not that there’s anything wrong with those methods, but they might lead to more student anxiety and be more challenging for disabled students)…consider how this tool might help you rethink teaching and learning.
Instead, you might…
Update your syllabus.
Check out the Sentient Syllabus Project for potential language you might use in your s