This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: An interdisciplinary team of researchers has developed and demonstrated a step-by-step framework called Socratic Challenger that uses artificial intelligence to help undergraduate students cultivate critical thinking skills. Specifically, the framework uses AI as a collaborator to develop research questions that can be pursued in laboratory or classroom settings.
"Formulating a good research question is a bottleneck in undergraduate inquiry," says Aram Mikaelyan, corresponding author of a journal article on the work and an associate professor of entomology at North Carolina State University. "Students can name topics they're interested in, but struggle to find ways to turn that interest into a meaningful research question that makes sense and can be developed into a research project. "We also know that undergraduates are often turning to AI for assistance with academic work without having a clear idea of what is expected of them or what they are trying to accomplish, which is not helpful," Mikaelyan says.
"So we developed a detailed, step-by-step workflow that allows students to use AI tools, requires students to think critically, and helps students develop research questions that can be used to enable undergraduate research." "Ideally, students could work with mentors to learn how to develop a meaningful research question—but that's not feasible given the number of students," says Erin McKenney, co-author of the article and an assistant professor in NC State's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "This framework, which we call Socratic Challenger, provides instructors with a new tool that can help to address that need." Socratic Challenger is a workflow consisting of eight steps, five of which are AI-enabled. The steps range from identifying a topic of interest to receiving feedback from (undergraduate) peers and instructors.
"To be clear, the AI is not generating the research question," says Mikaelyan. "Instead, the AI is essentially being used to interrogate the student's process and help them develop the habits of mind necessary to think critically about research. Is this really a gap in what we know about the topic?
What resources would I need to address this question, methodologically? And so on." To see whether Socratic Challenger was actually useful, the researchers conducted a proof-of-concept study with 45 students in an undergraduate ecology course. The students worked through the Socratic Challenger framework over a nine-week period and ultimately were tasked with submitting an abstract for the proposed research.
"We wanted to know if Socratic Challenger works and whether some steps in the workflow work better than others," says McKenney. "We also wanted to know whether students feel like it makes a difference and, if so, how." "What we found is that the students who made use of the Socratic Challenger framework developed really thoughtful research questions," says Mikaelyan. The researchers also found that the step-by-step structure of Socratic Challenger was important, and every step in the workflow was deemed important by the students.
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