Dr. Ruth Walker brought artificial intelligence into her classroom for the first time in spring 2024, and the experience went so well she’s expanding AI innovation into more of her courses.
Walker, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, incorporated AI into her Psychology as a Profession course by showing students how to use ChatGPT to help in crafting a professional identity.
“I showed them examples of how AI overuses phrases such as ‘team player,’ ‘dynamic’ and ‘results-oriented’ – all of which are phrases that 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.”
As students become more savvy users of ChatGPT in the scenarios Walker introduces to them, she said she believes the results can have a valuable tool for developing a professional identity.
“I even 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.
From that experience and others, Walker said she’s finding more advantages to making use of AI.
“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,” she said. “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.”
Career Development Assignments
“Career Development Assignments” Walker gives her Psychology as a Profession students including creating a resume, a LinkedIn profile and a curriculum vitae. To enhance these assignments, she introduced workshops and in-class activities to specifically address ethical use of AI tools, such as ChatGPT, in the development of these professional documents.
Walker said the AI-enabled skills she’s introducing to her classes are intended to address the impact AI usage 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, but 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 applications in 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. A guest post by I-O (industrial-organizational) psychology graduate student Sabrina Grebenstein, who also has been a guest speaker in Walker’s classroom to share strategies with students, focuses on interview preparation.
Enhanced competitiveness in the job market
In addition to introducing students to AI-enhanced resources for generating a compelling professional identity, Walker also intends to prepare students for expectations of AI usage after graduation.
“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,” Walker said.
She brings a focus on ethical implications of AI by discussing controversies around the environmental impact 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.
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.”
College of Arts and Sciences Dean Pam Riggs-Gelasco awarded a $500 stipend to Walker for her work to incorporate AI into a course for the first time.
UTC Undergraduate Psychology Degree Requirements
M.S. Industrial-Organizational Psychology program
M.S. Psychological Science program
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