ChatGPT will be a tool for helping identify and anticipate barriers to behavior change that Stephanie Wells will encourage students to use in her fall 2024 Psychology 3110 course. The “Learning and Motivation” course focuses on psychological theories and research on behavior change and behavioral research, said Wells, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
A semester-long “behavior change” project for which students collect and analyze data is a key component of the course. For the project, each student conducts a single-subject experiment in which they teach themselves, another person or an animal a new skill (or end a current behavior) using concepts learned in the course such as shaping, classical conditioning, operant conditioning and more.
In final presentations, students must discuss barriers to change they encountered or anticipated before, during and at the end of their projects. Many students struggle to anticipate barriers particularly at the beginning of their projects, or in submitting their topics for instructor feedback or approval, Wells said.
She plans to encourage students to use simple generative AI, specificall,y the free version of ChatGPT, to aid in brainstorming as a formal assignment done one to two weeks after students submit their project topics and before they begin data collection. Each student will construct prompts for generative AI in an “AI brainstorming assignment,” with the goal of generating ideas and recommendations for how to achieve the change proposed in the project topic and to overcome anticipated barriers, Wells said.
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Students will address questions of the propriety of citing AI as a legitimate source of scientific information. Students will choose and critically evaluate four to five of the AI-generated suggestions and proposed barriers and investigate their validity and information sources.
Wells said the assignment will open students to the possibilities offered by appropriate use of AI and challenge them to think critically about behavioral research, in general, and about the validity and reliability of information provided by popular AI generators, in particular.
College of Arts and Sciences Dean Pam Riggs-Gelasco awarded Wells a $250 stipend for her efforts to incorporate AI into a course assignment.
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