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
Short 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)
Recommended Citation
Giebutowski, Jill, "Empowering Students using Elicit: A Scaffolded Information Literacy Activity" (2024). Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy. 24.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gaintlit/2024/2024/24
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