Research as Inquiry

One of the knowledge practices for the Research as Inquiry frame states that “learners who are developing their information literate abilities deal with complex research by breaking complex questions into simple ones, limiting the scope of investigations.”11 We have found that students will often come to research consultations or library instruction sessions with broad or vague research questions that they often do not know how to simplify or narrow down to research writing sufficiently scoped to a level that they can tackle in five to eight pages. While they might be interested in, let’s say, “the problem of poverty” or “the abortion debate,” they cannot digest the enormous amount of research in multiple academic

disciplines that have attempted to address these types of questions. This is where we believe ChatGPT can help students (and even seasoned researchers) in generating ways to break complex problems down. ChatGPT can help refine research questions, determine search terms, come up with synonyms and related terms or phrases for searching, help decide which databases to search, generate textual concept maps, and even help generate citations. For example, here was the response it gave when we asked it “What search terms should we use for our hypothetical research question, ‘why aren’t college athletes paid?’”

ChatGPT can also create textual concept maps to help think through various aspects of a research topic. This can be useful for students who need to narrow or refine their topic. Simply asking the AI to help narrow a research topic can be useful as it will give you a variety of ways to explore a topic. For example, we asked it to help us narrow our search on why college athletes aren’t paid, and it gave us detailed options in an easy-to-read format:

You can see clearly how ChatGPT can help students push past that inquiry threshold. Often, they don’t even know where to start in their search for information, or how to probe the nuances or facets of a large complex question for a scope they can grasp. Instead of typing their entire research question into Google or a database (as we have all seen students do) and having to sift through a mountain of results, they can type it into ChatGPT and ask “How do I start searching? Where could I go from here? What’s manageable?” As students are growing in their information literacy abilities, ChatGPT can help scaffold their skills enabling them to accomplish this task more confidently in the future. One caveat that always bears repeating: ChatGPT has biases. It is trained on a large dataset of material from the internet. It may not produce underrepresented or less well-researched aspects of a topic. Because of this, it is important for students to explore topics holistically, with ChatGPT as one tool in their toolbelt.