Ethical Use of AI gives a boost to students in narrowing topic and finding keywords :
Today’s student have artificial intelligence or AI to perform various tasks that once took hours or even days to perform. AI can help in research, writing, and proofreading. Many of these tasks appear unethical to students who still prefer to do their work by themselves. However, if students provide a transparency statement in which they highlight how they perform the task using AI, they will not only improve their productivity, but even enhance the final outcome. In this article we will cover the four key points that you can include in your transparency statement if you are allowed to use AI.
For the purpose of this article, consider a brief case study which I will use to show how you can develop an ethical statement. Assume that you are preparing an assignment for the course “organizational behavior” and you have studied topics like psychological contract, employee engagement, organizational culture, and organizational socialization. Additionally, assume that you work in police and recently your department has hired new recruits. Your department already has many officers. You are required to prepare a briefing to Police Minister and your country police is facing issues like:
- Organizational culture (unhappy with current conditions and unable to adjust with huge influx of newcomers)
- Organizational socialization (how to adjust with new comers)
- Psychological contract (how new recruits can develop psychological contract that will not be broken)
- Employee engagement (how to involve new recruits physically, socially, and cognitively to their new roles)
These are just the initial ideas that students can use to derive their briefings. New, I will move to the ethical statement which will show I used AI to create this briefing.
Deciding My Focus :
I began with a broad topic, Psychological contracts in the Police, and asked Copilot to generate related subtopics. From the list of 15 sub-topics, I narrowed my focus to the “Impact on Wellbeing.” Using Copilot, I further refined this into research questions that encompassed aspects such as retention, job satisfaction, stress, and the role of leadership. These questions were then developed into a research focus for Assignment. This approach culminated in my central research question: “How does leadership behavior impact the maintenance of psychological contracts and the retention of Police officers?” Copilot was helpful for this process of narrowing and refining my research focus. It generated multiple subtopics and research questions at once very quickly with a lot of interesting variety.
Curation :
I asked Copilot to provide a list of 20 keywords and then 15 search strings related to my research question. I used these search strings on Semantic Scholar to find relevant research articles, such as “Leadership behavior AND psychological contracts AND retention” and “Psychological contract breaches AND police officers AND turnover.” I found leveraging Copilot like this during the curation stage was highly effective. The generated keywords and search strings significantly streamlined the process of finding relevant articles, supporting a thorough and well-organized set of resources. Semantic Scholar provided quick access to highly relevant, though quite technical and detailed articles. It has some useful features like citations and summaries.
Integration :
I created a reading synthesis grid using results from my Semantic Scholar search, library searches, and course readings. This process was supported by attending two University library workshops on creating a reading grid and synthesizing research into writing. Although it took considerable time and effort, taking notes in a reading grid helped me organize my ideas identify common themes and relationships across my sources. Using a reading synthesis grid was highly effective in organizing and integrating key sources, enabling me to identify common themes and relationships. The library workshops provided a few basic note-taking and synthesis strategies that I tried to apply and practice. It does take effort and discipline, but this approach provided significant benefits when I started to draft my assignment.
Refinement :
I used Copilot and Grammarly (free) to enhance the quality of my written work. I asked Copilot to review my draft and suggest improvements for clarity and conciseness and academic style. Copilot provided specific feedback on sentence structure, word choice, and overall flow to compare with my original. Next, I used Grammarly Free before submitting to proofread, focusing on grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors. Grammarly highlighted several issues, which I corrected to ensure a polished final version.
Copilot provided a lot of feedback very rapidly, which was overwhelming and difficult to manage. Even though some suggestions looked okay, it was challenging to sort out and take up all the feedback. I was worried that I didn’t understand everything and that it didn’t really sound like me either. Next time I will try this again but I will only use one sentence or paragraph so I can look more closely at the feedback. Grammarly helps a lot with correcting annoying mistakes and getting rid of unnecessary words. I will continue using it throughout the drafting process as I find it useful although sometimes, I turn it off as it can be quite intrusive.
Retrospect :
In the above process, I did not use AI to write anything for me neither I use it to search articles for the paper. Instead, I used it to find sub-topics, keywords and search strings, and proofread my work. Students can achieve best outcomes and do their work efficiently if they know when to turn AI off.
