Two lenses on how AI can benefit students

In the classroom, Stettenbenz works with students to use generative AI to hone their academic writing skills and to use the tool ethically and thoughtfully.

Early in the term, students in his class begin looking deeply into the ethics of AI, its benefits and its drawbacks, and its social impact. He stimulates discussions in class to collect student attitudes and opinions about AI and he uses this honest dialog as a basis for students to look at how they can use AI ethically.

"I like AI because students get passionate if you hit the right subjects. When they get to hear all of their peers talking about the strengths and weaknesses, it is a really constructive environment."

Students also create a literacy narrative – an autobiographical reflection on their experiences with reading and writing. Then they have generative AI try to replicate their personal literary narrative. On the one hand, the AI version of the literacy narrative is always wildly inaccurate and often ridiculous. But Stettenbenz says that this exercise vividly shows them the weaknesses of using generative AI to produce an entire document.

"What AI does not do very well is analyze, critically think, and come up with its own ideas. Whenever I've had students produce documents using AI in the past, you can almost instantly tell because it is just done on a surface level."

In one assignment, groups use generative AI to create a prompt that would help incoming students. In the past, students have made useful prompts that help with time management or work as mental health checklists. This exercise is a bit of an a-ha moment for the students. They begin to think of generative AI as a tool that can help them work through issues that they experience rather than simply acting as a text generator.

The main goal is to get them to start using generative AI to refine their writing rather than to produce an entire document.

As a success coach, he works one-on-one with students to get them to uncover the cause of their academic struggles and to work out a plan to overcome them. He has found that in certain situations AI can help students get back on track.

He recently worked with a student who had trouble moving their ideas from their head to the page. When the student started to work on an assignment, they would come up with many ideas for it. But as they moved to typing them out or getting them on paper, the student would blank out and forget their ideas.

Stettenbenz found a way to help. He asked the student to try discussing possible topics with a generative AI app, "to spark ideas like you're talking to someone about the subject. Then after that, while it is fresh in your brain, talk to a speech-to-text application and get everything out of your head that you can."

This pairing of generative AI and a speech-to-text app (IU offerings include Microsoft Immersive Reader, Thorium, and Adobe Acrobat, among others.) worked for the student and helped them overcome the problem. Using the tools together gave the student a workable first draft, but more importantly, it gave the student a strategy to use going forward.

At the end of the day, as both a success coach and as a writing instructor, Stettenbenz feels optimistic about how students are using generative AI. "I feel like over the years, especially with both of my roles, we are seeing students use it less in ways that we feared that they would use it."