Volume 12 Issue 2 (2023)

The Utility of ChatGPT in Educational Research—Potential Opportunities and Pitfalls

pp. 7-13  |  Published Online: May 2023  |  DOI: 10.22521/edupij.2023.122.1

Turgut Karakose

Abstract

Background/purpose –Leveraging the latest developments in natural language processing, recent versions of ChatGPT has demonstrated astounding performance on a wide array of tasks through its ability to understand and generate human language, and respond to diverse conversational prompts. Its remarkable performance in numerous applications has also attracted researchers’ attention, prompting investigations into the potential utility of this AI-tool to enhance scientific work. The current paper aims to present a succinct overview of the opportunities and challenges of using ChatGPT in educational research based on the anticipations and analysis of scholars from different fields of research.

Practical implications – ChatGPT is a double-edged sword with its potential benefits and caveats for scientific research. Educational researchers could benefit from the utility of ChatGPT in identifying gaps in the literature, generating new ideas and developing hypothesis, devising surveys or rating scales, conducting systematic reviews, eliminating human error in analysis of large datasets as well as drafting and editing scientific manuscripts. On the other hand, the current limitations of ChatGPT in enabling a reliable and transparent generation of content, its inability to provide accurate references or tendency to suggest non-existent resources, and incompatibility with the current ethical and legal obligations of academic publishing warrants cautious and meticulous endeavor of educational researchers.

Conclusion – The current era has witnessed groundbreaking advancements in AI-based technologies, which will for sure act as precursor for the development of more-developed AI-systems that could overcome the recent shortcomings of ChatGPT in aiding scientific research. Till then, scientists working in the education field should continue striving to understand its potential to advance any aspect of their scientific quest, and collaborate to formulate guidelines and principles to enable the ethical and responsible integration of these new technologies into scientific research and publishing. 

Keywords: ChatGPT, educational research, artificial intelligence, AI-based technologies

References

Ali, M. J., & Djalilian, A. (2023): Readership Awareness Series –Paper 4: Chatbots and ChatGPT - Ethical Considerations in Scientific Publications. Seminars in Ophthalmology, https://doi.org/10.1080/08820538.2023.2193444     

Aljanabi, M. (2023). ChatGPT: Future directions and open possibilities. Mesopotamian Journal of Cybersecurity, 16-17. https://doi.org/10.58496/MJCS/2023/003  

Alkaissi, H., & McFarlane, S. I. (2023). Artificial hallucinations in ChatGPT: implications in scientific writing. Cureus, 15(2). https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.35179

Belouadi, J., & Eger, S. (2022). Bygpt5: End-to-end style-conditioned poetry generation with token-free language models. arXiv, preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.10474

Borji, A. A. (2023).Categorical Archive of ChatGPT Failures. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2302.03494

Burger, B., Kanbach, D.K., Kraus, S., Breier, M., & Corvello, V. (2023). On the use of AI-based tools like ChatGPT to support management research. European Journal of Innovation Management, 26(7), 233-241. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJIM-02-2023-0156

Dahmen, J., Kayaalp, M. E., Ollivier, M., Pareek, A., Hirschmann, M. T., Karlsson, J., & Winkler, P. W. (2023). Artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT in medical research: the potential game changer as a double-edged sword. Knee Surgery, Sports Traumatology, Arthroscopy, 31(4), 1187-1189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00167-023-07355-6   

Dowling, M., & Lucey, B. (2023). ChatGPT for (finance) research: The Bananarama conjecture. Finance Research Letters, 53, 103662. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.frl.2023.103662

Frieder, S., Pinchetti, L., Griffiths, R.R., Salvatori, T., Lukasiewicz, T., Petersen, P.C., Chevalier, A., & Berner, J. (2023). Mathematical capabilities of chatGPT. arXiv, preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2301.13867

Hisan, U. K., & Amri, M. M. (2023). ChatGPT and medical education: A double-edged sword. Journal of Pedagogy and Education Science, 2(01), 71-89. https://doi.org/10.56741/jpes.v2i01.302

Kasneci, E., Seßler, K., Küchemann, S., Bannert, M., Dementieva, D., Fischer, F., Gasser, U., et al. (2023). ChatGPT for good? On opportunities and challenges of large language models for education. Learning and Individual Differences, 103, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2023.102274

Kim, S. G. (2023). Using ChatGPT for language editing in scientific articles. Maxillofacial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, 45(1), 13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40902-023-00381-x  

Kitamura, F.C. (2023) ChatGPT is shaping the future of medical writing but still requires human judgment. Radiology, 230171. https://doi.org/10.1148/radiol.230171

Liebrenz, M., Schleifer, R., Buadze, A., Bhugra, D., & Smith, A. (2023). Generating scholarly content with ChatGPT: ethical challenges for medical publishing. The Lancet Digital Health, 5(3), e105-e106. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2589-7500(23)00019-5  

Liu, Y., Han, T., Ma, S., Zhang, J., Yang, Y., Tian, J., et al. (2023). Summary of chatGPT/GPT-4 research and perspective towards the future of large language models. arXiv, preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2304.01852

Macdonald, C., Adeloye, D., Sheikh, A., & Rudan, I. (2023). Can ChatGPT draft a research article? An example of population-level vaccine effectiveness analysis. Journal of Global Health, 13,01003. https://doi.org/10.7189/jogh.13.01003  

Marchandot, B., Matsushita, K., Carmona, A., Trimaille, A., & Morel, O. (2023). ChatGPT: the next frontier in academic writing for cardiologists or a pandora’s box of ethical dilemmas. European Heart Journal Open, 3(2), oead007. https://doi.org/10.1093/ehjopen/oead007

Michail, A., Konstantinou, S., & Clematide, S. (2023). Uzh clyp at semeval-2023 task 9: Head-first fine-tuning and chatGPT data generation for cross-lingual learning in tweet intimacy prediction. arXiv, preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.01194

Nature Editorial (2023). Tools such as ChatGPT threaten transparent science; here are our ground rules for their use. Nature, 612-613. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00191-1

Noever, D., & McKee, F. (2023). Numeracy from literacy: Data science as an emergent skill from large language models. arXiv, preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2301.13382

Nov, O., Singh, N., & Mann, D.M.(2023). Putting chatGPT’s medical advice to the (turing) test. medRxiv, preprint. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.01.23.23284735

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue. Available at: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/  (accessed on 5 April 2023)

Sabzalieva, E. & Valentini, A. (2023). Chat GPT and artificial Intelligence in higher education: A quick start guide. UNESCO.

Sallam, M. (2023). ChatGPT utility in healthcare education, research, and practice: Systematic review on the promising perspectives and valid concerns. Healthcare, 11(6). https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11060887

Shen, Y., Heacock, L., Elias, J., Hentel, K. D., Reig, B., Shih, G., & Moy, L. (2023). ChatGPT and other large language models are double-edged swords. Radiology, 307(2), e230163. https://doi.org/10.1148/radiol.230163

Sok, S., & Heng, K. (2023). ChatGPT for education and research: A review of benefits and risks. SSRN. Available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4378735 (accessed on 5 April 2023)

Taecharungroj, V. (2023). “What Can ChatGPT Do?” Analyzing Early Reactions to the Innovative AI Chatbot on Twitter. Big Data and Cognitive Computing, 7(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.3390/bdcc7010035  

Thorp, H. H. (2023). ChatGPT is fun, but not an author. Science, 379(6630), 313-314. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adg7879

 Xames, M. D., & Shefa, J. (2023). ChatGPT for research and publication: Opportunities and challenges Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2023.6.1.20

Wang, S., Scells, H., Koopman, B., & Zuccon, G. (2023). Can chatGPT write a good Boolean query for systematic review literature search?. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2302.03495

Wen, J., & Wang, W. (2023). The future of ChatGPT in academic research and publishing: A commentary for clinical and translational medicine. Clinical and Translational Medicine, 13(3), e1207. https://doi.org/10.1002/ctm2.1207

West, C.G. (2023). Ai and the FCI: Can chatGPT project an understanding of introductory physics? arXiv, pre-print. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.01067

Zhai, X. (2022). ChatGPT user experience: implications for education. SSRN.  http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4312418

Announcement

EDUPIJ News!

► Journal Metrics

  • 9% acceptance rate
  • 1.8 (2022) CiteScore (Scopus)
  • Q3 (2022) CiteScore Best Quartile
  • 0.294 (2022) Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR)
  • 0.612 (2022) Source-Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) 

EDUPIJ Statistics from Scopus

CiteScore: 1.8, view Scopus page

SCImago Journal & Country Rank

► Educational Process: International Journal is member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). 

► New issue coming soon! (Volume 13 Issue 2, 2024)