Project introduction and background information
Our context is the master (and minor) in science education, a.k.a. STEM1 teacher education. The student population consists of STEM people, who generally find it difficult to reflect on their learning as a teacher. Lately we found students had asked ChatGPT to write their reflection on teacher personal identity for them. Although this might be considered as fraud, it was also a smart thing to do and their question to ChatGPT also incorporated their reflection; it was the wordy writing part they left to the AI. This is just one example on how an AI can be both desirable and undesirable in STEM teacher education.
The versatile use of ChatGPT may have benefits in and for education (Trust, Whalen & Mouza 2023), but it comes with inherent drawbacks such as plagiarism since it is quite good at passing for instance engineering courses’ assessments (Nicolic et al., 2023). This has caused the TU/e general examination committee to mark the use of ChatGPT specifically in exams as fraud.
Research so far has focused on seeing what the AI is capable of in terms of teaching, explaining physics or mathematics (Gregorcic & Pendrill, 2023; Kock, Salinas-Hernández, & Pepin, 2023) or writing papers (e.g. Kortemeyer, 2023; ACS, 2023). Initiatives have been taken on how to use a generative AI in writing academic papers including the proper way to reference to the use of it (ACS, 2023).
There are however also initiatives at TU/e and other universities to use ChatGPT in assign-ments and education rather than ban it outright (SURF, 2023). So far there has not been a study into the use ChatGPT in university science teacher education, although it has been advised to look into possibilities and to come to terms both in policy and practice on how the AI can be incorporated in teacher education and teaching (Trust, Whalen & Mouza, 2023). In this study we want to explore how ChatGPT could be used in university STEM teacher education within the 4TU teacher education institutes to come to balanced and well-considered suggestions for curriculum redesign in 4TU STEM teacher education courses and policy. Due to the nature of the master program, future high school science teachers practice will be innovated as a spin-off effect.