AI-Augmented Literature Reviews

Submitter: Justin Lewis, Olympic C

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The experiment:

I am including an assignment where students are tasked with creating a literature review by leveraging both AI tools and their personal analytical skills. This assignment is strictly focused on production, eliminating the need for students to conduct any external research. Instead, I supply them with a curated set of texts alongside a specific topic or focus. The students are then expected to utilize AI to help draft summaries and identify central ideas within these texts, but it’s crucial that they also engage their own critical thinking skills to synthesize these insights into a cohesive literature review. This review should be suitable for academic purposes or use within professional or technical communication contexts. The assignment involves several steps, requiring careful attention and sufficient time for completion. Ideally, the students’ submissions should represent a harmonious integration of AI-generated content and their original writing.

Results:

Students reported that the iteration process was sometimes daunting and they often had to “reboot” their chatbots to provide focus in their work; however, most also noted that this was a far more efficient way to go about the research process and really helped them see connections among a corpus in ways that reading EVERYTHING didn’t really allow them to do (due to time constraints).

Relevant resources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nyVK_Ccl3JVtdL68uJ9SulT6OYKZO0I-hR2l-2b8Bc8/edit?usp=sharing

Contact: http://justinlewis.me