Using AI to Assist My Chemistry Classroom

When I started hearing about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT, I was incredibly skeptical. I have a colleague who uses AI to grade his classroom essays and provide feedback to students.  This colleague raved about it, but it has upset other teachers, parents, and students alike. They feel the computer, and not the teacher, is doing the “work” of teaching. I have seen AI used to generate summaries of messages and emails, which I find concerning since it does all the work for you. My current student teacher shared with me that his education program at the University of Michigan is using AI as part of their instruction as a way to show new teachers how to create resources and ideas for lessons rapidly. 

These tasks illustrate ways AI is replacing some human cognitive skills, and I had reservations about using it. However, I think AI can be useful if used appropriately. I believe the way I have used it in my chemistry classes is appropriate enough and has truly assisted me and saved me some time. I  will describe ways I have employed an AI tool called ChatGPT in my classroom. 

Create Questions

One of the quickest ways to use ChatGPT in a pinch is to ask it to write questions.  If you are teaching something in class and looking for more or new questions, you can ask ChatGPT to produce those for you.   To use this appropriately, ALWAYS VET the questions produced, and ALWAYS go through at least one additional iteration to find better or more specific questions.  

Here is an example of the classification of matter.  In the image below, you can see the first iteration in ChatGPT:

You can tell ChatGPT how many questions (5), what type of questions (multiple choice), and the topic you’d want those questions to be on (classification of matter).  But let’s say I don’t like these questions, and I want questions in which the answers are only element, compound, or mixture - I can tell it to do that.  The AI usually asks if you want to change anything at the end of the post:

After inspecting and vetting these questions, they can be ready to use, or you can have ChatGPT make more like these or change them to your liking.  Perhaps you want short answer questions:

ChatGPT even understands you if you accidentally make a typo (like I did here with the word heterogenous).  

Then, when you feel satisfied with your results, you can use these questions in your assignments.  I like to copy and paste them into a document to print, use them as poll questions in my slideshow, or post them directly on my learning platform.  

Create Alternative Assessments 

I do not think I am alone in the absentee issue, but I always struggled as to what to do when a student missed a quiz or a test.  The effort was 100% on me to make a new version or create a new task so students could make up the quiz/test with some fidelity. Here is where ChatGPT came in handy!  You can tell it your situation, and it can provide some ideas for you:

Let’s say you do not like all of these ideas; you can tell ChatGPT to give you more ideas and make them more specific:

When using ChatGPT to make alternative assessments, you do not have to worry about test security and you can push the responsibility of the make-up onto students with these assignments.  If needed, you can have the AI generate answer keys or examples for all assessments.  

I have also had AI generate new questions for an existing exam.  You can upload a document right into ChatGPT and tell it to do something with it.  For example, some of my unit tests have short answers, but maybe I want an all-multiple-choice test for ease of grading - you can tell it to do that with the uploaded test:

Create (Accurate) Data,

Another concern for a teacher is when a student is absent from a lab.  I recently ran into this issue during a heating curve lab in which students measured the temperature over time of ice melting to boiling.  I instructed students to record the temperature every minute until the water was boiling, and this took about 20 minutes.   Besides sharing data or violating merit by collecting honest lab data, I was unsure of an easier way for absent students to plot and analyze lab data.  I wondered if ChatGPT could help me collect data.  It can create images and answer questions. Why not real lab data?  And it surprised me:

This data was perfect enough to share with an absent student to be graphed and analyzed for learning.  You can also make it give you more or less data, and you can change the substance being analyzed.  I had an issue with students copying from each other, so I told it to provide me with the data for a substance that was not water:

Edit & Update Emails To Send

A final way for me to use ChatGPT is to have it help me edit or curate emails that I can send to parents.   This is especially helpful if I am having writer's block on how to start an email or get the right wording.  When I received a student teacher, I had to send a message home covering certain items to inform parents.  Instead of playing with different wordings off the top of my head, I just had ChatGPT make something.

ChatGPT, when used appropriately, can really help save you some time and effort on tasks that otherwise may take time away from other things you can be doing, such as helping/interacting with students, grading, reading, etc.  

I would avoid the following traps for inappropriate AI use:

1. Using the first response from ChatGPT
2. Blindly using questions, assessments, content, or material produced by ChatGPT.
3. Assigning AI-generated questions to students that you did not answer yourself.  

Although I was concerned that it would take away the critical thinking and problem-solving skills required for future educators,  if you use ChatGPT as a thinking partner, you can combat that by making sure you vet and check what is produced.