1. What were your initial thoughts or expectations about using ChatGPT and inquiry-based learning in this course?
My initial thought was that I need to be familiar with using ChatGPT to help me with writing in this AI era, including gathering ideas and data, and I was not good at giving useful prompts, so I expected I could improve the speed and efficiency of academic writing through this course. As for inquiry-based learning, I didn’t experience this kind of study method before, but I thought it might be a more interesting and more effective way to learn compared to the other courses I took in the past.
2. How has your perception of inquiry-based learning and ChatGPT changed throughout the course?
Throughout the course, I have realized that inquiry-based learning is more difficult than I thought in the beginning as we must put lots of effort into designing survey and using different way to analyze data in order to produce a comprehensive research paper. With regard to my perception of ChatGPT, I learned many different ways to give prompts, like scoring my essay based on the scoring rubric, highlighting the mistakes and maintaining the same academic tone throughout the whole changing process. I also understand that I need to give ChatGPT my outline if I want it to provide a proper survey structure or revise my essay. In conclusion, this course broadened my understanding of using ChatGPT, and ChatGPT helped me improve my writing skills and critical thinking.
3. Reflect on a specific instance where inquiry-based learning or ChatGPT helped improve your writing performance. How did this experience impact your learning?
About inquiry-based learning, the most impressive instance is that the professor said we should try our best to stay neutral when creating the survey because we should not lead the respondents with our own original thoughts. I think this is the most important thing in the process, which I didn’t realize before, and I will examine my questions design and the structure of the survey more carefully in the future. As for ChatGPT, I found out that I could ask it to maintain the same tone throughout the revising process, which was good news for me as I hated the AI change my original tone or even original thoughts. Furthermore, it could also help me to check if my essay remain academic tone at the end of my writing.
4. What challenges did you face when engaging in inquiry-based learning or using ChatGPT? How did you overcome these challenges?
I struggled a little bit when it comes to analyzing the data and turning them into paragraph, so I tried to give ChatGPT more different prompts to help me with writing. When using ChatGPT, I found that sometimes it would provide messy information, like giving me the unrelated questions when designing survey, so I gave it my outline, and then it became more precise and structured.
5. Overall, how do you think the integration of inquiry-based learning and ChatGPT has influenced your writing skills and overall learning experience?
The integration of these two things is a whole new learning experience for me, and it influenced my writing skills in many different ways. I could gather my ideas and analyze collective data quickly and strategically, including writing outline and designing research survey. I could also give varied prompts to revise my essay, and I think it will help a lot when it comes to self-learning in the future. After this course, I found that instructor could be a leading character, teaching the students the methods and use of the tools, and then making us delve into the topic we are interested in. Furthermore, this was the first time I felt that our studying result could collect the voices outside the classroom and impact the society in a good way.