Empowering Students using Elicit: A Scaffolded Information Literacy Activity

Type of Presentation

Individual paper/presentation

Conference Strand

Critical Literacy

Target Audience

Higher Education

Second Target Audience

K-12

Relevance

This proposal discusses the use of Elicit, a research-oriented AI tool in a first-year college writing research project, focusing on scaffolded instruction in using the tool as well as student reflection and critical evaluation of the information Elicit generated.

Proposal

Today’s students are known as “digital natives” but they never seem as comfortable with digital tools as we expect them to be. Add AI to the mix, and they are even more out of their depths, even as they are saddled with the awareness that AI will likely be ubiquitous in their professional futures. In response, students and the faculty teaching them face an imperative to learn how to use AI, even though, as Laquintano, Schnitzler & Vee point out, “there are real potentials and limits to generative AI…but these remain extremely difficult technologies to grasp.”

With the intent to scaffold AI information literacy practices and target specific parts of the writing process, the “Empowering Students” activity introduces first-year college writing students to a research tool called Elicit, which helps them flesh out research topic ideas and identify credible sources.

This presentation will also include sample student responses to an “attitudes about AI” survey and an “integrating AI speech” which addresses some of the things to watch out for with AI, including bias, hallucinations, and risk of plagiarism. The presentation will also share excerpts from student reflection on using Elicit, including their critical evaluation of the quality of materials the tool was able to generate for them. Participants will leave with a strategy to integrate AI into their research-related projects.

Reference

Laquintano, T., Schnitzler, C. & Vee, A. (2023). Introduction to teaching with text generation technologies. In A. Vee, T. Laquintano, & C. Schnitzler (Eds.), TextGenEd: Teaching with Text Generation Technologies. The WAC Clearinghouse. https://doi.org/10.37514/TWR-J.2023.1.1.02

Presentation Description

Writing teachers face a challenging task in figuring out how and when to integrate AI, especially within research writing. Students need to learn how to use AI critically, ethically and responsibly. The bridge to these two things is careful and targeted instruction that does not devalue the writing process. This presentation will explore the potential empowering effect on students when using scaffolded instruction of Elicit, an AI-driven tool.

Keywords

Information literacy; AI tool; scaffolding

Publication Type and Release Option

Presentation (Open Access)

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Apr 19th, 3:20 PM Apr 19th, 4:05 PM

Empowering Students using Elicit: A Scaffolded Information Literacy Activity

Today’s students are known as “digital natives” but they never seem as comfortable with digital tools as we expect them to be. Add AI to the mix, and they are even more out of their depths, even as they are saddled with the awareness that AI will likely be ubiquitous in their professional futures. In response, students and the faculty teaching them face an imperative to learn how to use AI, even though, as Laquintano, Schnitzler & Vee point out, “there are real potentials and limits to generative AI…but these remain extremely difficult technologies to grasp.”

With the intent to scaffold AI information literacy practices and target specific parts of the writing process, the “Empowering Students” activity introduces first-year college writing students to a research tool called Elicit, which helps them flesh out research topic ideas and identify credible sources.

This presentation will also include sample student responses to an “attitudes about AI” survey and an “integrating AI speech” which addresses some of the things to watch out for with AI, including bias, hallucinations, and risk of plagiarism. The presentation will also share excerpts from student reflection on using Elicit, including their critical evaluation of the quality of materials the tool was able to generate for them. Participants will leave with a strategy to integrate AI into their research-related projects.

Reference

Laquintano, T., Schnitzler, C. & Vee, A. (2023). Introduction to teaching with text generation technologies. In A. Vee, T. Laquintano, & C. Schnitzler (Eds.), TextGenEd: Teaching with Text Generation Technologies. The WAC Clearinghouse. https://doi.org/10.37514/TWR-J.2023.1.1.02