14 Activity Creation: Soundness of the Argument

Critical thinking is an important skill for students to develop. While some information that we present to students is factual/technical, in every subject there are nuanced conversations where students need to be able to apply the technical knowledge they have learned to a range of circumstances.

Having students engage in small group discussion around a topic is an excellent way to help them build critical thinking skills and engage meaningfully with the topics of study. For an instructor, however, a frustrating task of class preparation can be finding just the right piece of writing to share with students on a topic to generate discussion. Writing this yourself is time consuming, looking for something from a published source often uncovers something that is too long, to in-depth or has other flaws that make it unworkable. Generative AI offers a potential solution to this issue.

Generative AI can quickly create a piece of writing on a topic of your choosing that is written at a depth/length that you specify. If the initial piece produced is not to your liking, you can engage Generative AI in conversation to refine its output and shape it to what you want.  You can also take what it produces and use that as a base, editing it yourself to get the framing you want. You may choose to highlight or remove aspects of what Generative AI produces to open up greater room for discussion.

Activity Creation Steps

• Ask generative AI to create a persuasive argument on a topic related to your course giving details on the depth/length/appropriate audience for this output.
• Review the output and refine as needed (you can ask the Generative AI program to do this or copy this initial output to a Word Processing product and do so yourself). Possible refinements:
  • Error correction if Generative AI has made a mistake in what it produced.
  • Bias/balance: depending on what you are trying to achieve through this activity, you may want to highlight one aspect of the argument over others or introduce/remove bias to give students more to discuss.
• Create discussion discussion prompts for your students. Possible questions:
  • How sound is this argument?
  • Do you agree or disagree?
  • Are their perspectives or approaches that are missing?
  • You could also ask Generative AI to create questions for you.
• Break your students into small discussion groups and present them with both the argument and the discussion question.

Considerations

• Do you want to present your students with a balanced argument to let them see all the points, or a slightly off-balance one that will allow them to note gaps?
• To model Academic Integrity, make sure to include a statement that acknowledges your use of Generative AI to create the activity content.
• Please refer to cautions in the Introduction that apply to all activities using Generative AI.