Related Academic Event
Critical thinking in an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Era: Creating critical opportunities for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)
Project Description
This project addresses what is being debated in all HEIs worldwide, i.e., the preponderance of the use of Generative AI Gen AI for all tasks in and outside the classroom. This includes graded work, including essays, short answers, and projects. In the end, one wonders if they are grading students or technology. Many faculty members are struggling to find ways to motivate their students to become critical thinkers (which is what employers seek). Faculty members are faced with work that is clearly AI-generated and, subsequently, gives no indication of the level of critical thinking the student has attained.
Thus, this project will complement Dr. Zizka’s earlier work on Academic Writing and Gen AI to investigate how critical thinking could be improved and assessed via Academic Writing tasks. Dr. Zizka has proposed a new movement (PACE) to slow down how Gen AI is introduced and implemented in AW. PACE stands for Prompt Engineering, Authenticity/Accuracy, Critical Thinking, and Evaluation/Assessment. This will provide the base of the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL) 2026 workshop, where the project will be launched and invitations for participation will be sought.
