Dr. Ruth Walker’s experience of using AI for the first time in a course in spring 2024 has led her to plan to do so again in the fall.
Walker, a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga psychology professor, incorporated AI into her Psychology 2070 course: Psychology as a Profession by showing students how to use ChatGPT in crafting a professional identity. While encouraging students to use AI, Walker also emphasized its limitations.
“I showed them examples of how AI overuses phrases such as ‘team player,’ ‘dynamic’ and ‘results-oriented’ – all of which focus on telling rather than showing potential employers the type of worker you are,” Walker said. “ChatGPT doesn’t integrate evidence to support these types of statements, so students need to understand how to recognize and overcome these limitations to be competitive in the workplace.”
When students do overcome these challenges, Walker said, she believes the results can be immensely valuable for students’ professional identity. She said her students seem to be interested in the new addition.
“I had a past student reach out to me in the spring and say they taught their dad how to use it when he was going back on the job market.” Walker said.
Career Development Assignments
Students in the psychology course engaged in “Career Development Assignments,” including the creation of a resume, a LinkedIn profile and a curriculum vitae. To enhance these assignments, the units introduced a series of workshops and in-class activities that specifically addressed the ethical use of AI tools, such as ChatGPT, in the development of these professional documents.
Walker said the skills she’s introducing in her class are intended to address the gravity AI use can have in undergraduates’ future career development.
“The job market is now inundated with people using AI to write their resumes and LinkedIn profile content for them. It’s not enough to have depersonalized AI-generated content.” Walker said, “This means I have to spend a lot of time showing students the difference between content that is generic and solely generated by AI, such as ChatGPT, and content that is personalized and generated through a mix of both AI and human labor.”
In her blog, PsyVocational Blog on her Careers in Psychology website, Walker discusses AI’s application for career development. Posts focus on how to use AI to generate a compelling LinkedIn Headline and how to use ChatGPT to prepare for job interviews.
Enhanced competitiveness in the job market
Walker’s psychology course module on AI had additional resources to guide the development of professional identity and showcase transferable skills to make students more competitive in the workforce prior to graduation and after graduation.
As Walker noted, “Many organizations and industries are moving toward incorporating their own GPTs (Generative Pre-trained Transformers), meaning many of our students need to prepare for using AI in their future workplace.”
The course also addresses ethical considerations around energy consumption to enable AI. One of these is the environmental demand of using AI, specifically concerning water. This was the subject of a 2023 study on state-of-the-art computer data centers involved in creating AI models, “Making AI Less ‘Thirsty’: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models.”
“I think it’s an under-discussed ethical implication of using conversational AI that I want students to be aware of so they can make informed decisions about how comfortable they are using it and to what extent.” Walker said.
Among other courses into which Walker is incorporating AI are some for graduate students.
“The more I have learned about the utility of AI, I have integrated it more into my work.” Walker said, “For example, graduate students in my qualitative methods course have experimented with having ChatGPT help us draft interview questions and analyze data. We then identified the limitations and edited the work to better meet best practices in qualitative research. I have also worked to find ways it can help support students working with me on independent research,” Walker said.
College of Arts and Sciences Dean Pam Riggs-Gelasco awarded a $500 stipend to Walker for her initial incorporation of AI into the Psychology as a Profession course.
Walker said she and her students are still learning how best to make use of AI in the classroom. “The majority of students are receptive and are able to use the recommended prompts in ChatGPT,” Walker said, adding that she “had some concerns with students not limiting their AI use to the parts of the assignments where it is permitted, so that is something I need to continue to work on.”
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UTC Undergraduate Psychology Degree Requirements
UTC M.S. Industrial-Organizational Psychology program