To gather knowledge for this research, in August 2024 we prompted three GenAI chatbots—the GPT-4o mannequin of ChatGPT, Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash mannequin, and Microsoft's newest Copilot mannequin—to generate two units of lesson plans for eighth grade civics lessons based mostly on Massachusetts state requirements. One was a typical lesson plan and the opposite a extremely interactive lesson plan.
We garnered a dataset of 311 AI-generated lesson plans, that includes a complete of two,230 actions for civic training. We analyzed the dataset utilizing two frameworks designed to evaluate instructional materials: Bloom's taxonomy and Banks' 4 ranges of integration of multicultural content material.
Bloom's taxonomy is a extensively used instructional framework that distinguishes between “lower-order” considering expertise, together with remembering, understanding, and making use of, and “higher-order” considering expertise—analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Utilizing this framework to investigate the information, we discovered 90 % of the actions promoted solely a primary stage of considering for college kids. College students have been inspired to study civics via memorizing, reciting, summarizing, and making use of data, somewhat than via analyzing and evaluating data, investigating civic points, or participating in civic motion tasks.
When inspecting the lesson plans utilizing Banks' four levels of integration of multicultural content model, which was developed within the Nineteen Nineties, we discovered that the AI-generated civics classes featured a somewhat slender view of historical past—usually leaving out the experiences of girls, Black Individuals, Latinos and Latinas, Asian and Pacific Islanders, disabled people, and different teams which have lengthy been ignored. Solely 6 % of the teachings included multicultural content material. These classes additionally tended to give attention to heroes and holidays somewhat than deeper explorations of understanding civics via a number of views.
General, we discovered the AI-generated lesson plans to be decidedly boring, conventional, and uninspiring. If civics lecturers used these AI-generated lesson plans as is, college students would miss out on lively, engaged studying alternatives to construct their understanding of democracy and what it means to be a citizen.
