Perhaps you’ve seen the ads: AI-powered tools that promise to find citations supporting “what students already know” so they can do their “research” faster. Is this the next evolution of modern writing and research? Or is it the result of a fundamental misunderstanding about what research is? In this breakout session, we will reframe undergraduate research as a process of discovery and exploration, not the validation of preexisting ideas. Moving beyond nostalgia for the “bad old days,” we will focus on assignment design, including a year-long faculty collaboration that attempted to keep intermediate writing students “in the loop” through video checkpoints. Along the way, we will consider how fair grading, implicit skill expectations, and timing interact with student engagement and the likelihood of AI use. We will also examine text density and the implications of students already using AI to look up, filter, and prioritize information. I will argue that we must be more explicit about our purposes in assigning research and will share scaffolding strategies and micro-assignments aligned with different learning goals.
- Teacher: Martin Rachel