Teaching Writing and Critical Information Literacy in an age of AI

Objectives

Writing program faculty and librarians will collaborate to design materials that will help instructors and students evaluate and integrate information composed by GAI into research-based writing. These materials will form a toolkit of GAI-related course materials, activities, and assignments that we will continuously modify as technology and needs change. This dynamic GAI toolkit will also serve as a springboard for ongoing faculty development and curricular innovation. 

Drawing on interrelated threshold concepts in writing studies and information literacy, the project seeks to enable students to analyze algorithmic bias in GAI technologies, verify factual claims made by GAI , integrate and cite AI-generated text in their writing in ethical and rhetorically effective ways, prompt GAI tools to compose more rhetorically effective and accurate text, and engage in conversations about how GAI technologies are changing writing and research.

Project team leads will work with co-directors to assess this program, lead workshops for faculty and writing center tutors, and design units or assignments related to GAI in their writing courses. Beta testers will participate in professional development workshops, implement one week of instruction on GAI in their WRIT 1150 sections, and gather assessment data about student learning. 

Outcomes 

This project fostered dialogue with faculty across disciplines about critical ways to engage with GAI in teaching writing and research in courses in their fields. We also have implemented a substantial program-wide shift in the Writing 1150 curriculum to make critically and ethically engaging GAI tools for writing and research as a key learning goal (impacting approximately 800 students a year). We will evaluate this impact with a post-survey of writing program students, focus groups of faculty, and reviewing syllabi. Preliminary key insights include:  

• Students are actively using AI tools to help generate ideas for writing, conduct research, learn course concepts, and engage in editing and revision tasks; as a result, it’s imperative that we provide instruction (and reflective discussion) about  how to use these tools critically, ethically and effectively for these tasks.
• Students are largely not seeing AI as a tool for writing entire essays (fears about this are likely overstated); we should trust that some of our students do not want to use AI to cheat, but do want to use it to assist with writing and to enhance their learning.
• Many students have used ChatGPT, but they could benefit from exploring a wider range of AI tools, learning to critically evaluate which tools might be most useful for particular writing, learning, and research tasks.

While more rigorous analysis is required, the survey indicated

• A wide range of student thoughts and feelings about AI, ranging from strong enthusiasm to wary interest to extremely critical skepticism.
• Students would like more clarity from professors about when and how they are expected to use or not use AI.
• Students are interested in exploring and critically analyzing the strengths and limitations of various AI tools.
• We should center student voices in ongoing conversations about AI in higher education.

Based on the results of the fall semester, project leads will develop a digital toolkit of resources for teaching writing and critical information literacy in relation to GAI, with an intended audience of all teachers of undergraduate core classes across disciplines who include writing assignments in their classes. 

Team