Sarah DeMoya

The courses where I use AI are in my lecture courses, PSYC1001 (The Science of Psychology) and PSYC2450 (Behavioral Neuroscience). Both of these are undergraduate courses with high enrollment, Science of Psych having around 170 students and Behavioral Neuroscience having around 75 students. Both of these courses are introductory courses (to psychology and to neuroscience, respectively) and so within the course we cover a lot of material that can be quite varied from chapter to chapter. The breadth of material combined with the high student to teacher ratio can make engaging students and understanding their individual needs very challenging.  

Leveraging AI for teaching materials 

I began using AI in the summer of 2024 to design course materials for PSYC1001. I was trying to create worksheets for students to probe their understanding of a given topic by presenting them with scenarios of varying difficulty but I was running out of creative juice in coming up with the number of scenarios that I wanted to include. I wondered if AI could come up with scenarios for me and I decided to test it out. Since then, I have used AI to make many worksheets, to generate discussion questions, and this semester I began using it to write practice exams to mirror the content of my actual exams. Because I write new exams every semester, I can sometimes get stuck in a rut in the types of questions that I write about a certain topic. For my most recent exam I had AI generate a list of the types of questions that could be asked about a certain topic, and then used that as a springboard for the questions that I wrote.  

Once I began creating worksheets for the students, I saw how much they really liked working through them in class and how it presented them with scenarios that challenged their understanding. The worksheets were a digestible format that led to them asking a lot of questions. I soon realized that I wanted to make worksheets for lectures because the students liked the extra practice and I liked that it led to their thinking more deeply and asking more questions. Now I have multiple worksheets for most class periods and will continue to develop more. Of course, using AI does not mean that I can copy down what it generates and call it a day. I still read through every scenario, discussion point, or question to make sure that it makes sense and that it is correct. But using AI, even with the time that it takes to check over what it generates, makes it much faster for me to create materials than if I made them entirely on my own. This allows me to provide more learning materials for the students in the same amount of time.

Developing students’ AI literacy

While I do not have any formal assignments using AI in my courses, I do talk to the students about the things to look out for as they are using AI. Some of them like to use it to summarize chapter notes or to come up with questions as they are studying. We talk about the importance of double-checking what AI generates because it will make mistakes, and that a student might not realize there is a mistake if they don’t have an understanding of the topic. 

Lessons learned from teaching and learning with AI 

The biggest advantage that I have seen in using AI is how many more resources I can provide for students when I use it because of how much more quickly it can create those materials than I can. And that is ultimately my goal: to provide students with many opportunities where they can engage with the material and deepen their understanding of a topic, especially in a large lecture class where I am not able to meet one on one with each of them.

Advice for colleagues on leveraging AI for teaching and learning

While there are many ways that AI could be used in the classroom, I have found it incredibly useful in generating formative assessments for the students to use as they master the course content. For faculty who are interested in providing more materials for their students to enhance their learning, I would highly encourage them to test out using AI!