Teaching introductory psychology in the age of AI
Decide what AI may assist, what students must retain responsibility for and what they must demonstrate independently.
Transferred from Psy101 Teaching, with its original examples and reading scope. For the current distinction between assistance, predefined workflows and agents, read Assistance, Workflows and Agents.
Start with the learning goal
If the goal is evaluating evidence, delegating all paper reading and comparison can remove the very work being assessed. If the goal is editing an explanation, a generated draft may be suitable material to critique. These are different educational tasks. Define the permitted contribution for each task rather than writing a single vague permission to “use AI responsibly.” This is editorial guidance.
Assisted performance and learning are different outcomes
A mathematics field trial by Bastani and colleagues found that unguarded AI assistance could harm later unaided performance; a specially designed tutor mitigated that problem. Its setting was high-school mathematics, not introductory psychology. A physics tutoring trial concerns a designed tutor, not an unrestricted chatbot. Both make task and tool design important questions, without establishing effects for a psychology course.
What psychology assessment evidence adds
The Scarfe infiltration study shows that AI-generated answers could receive marks without being recognized as such in one university’s psychology assessment system. It did not test whether those answers represented learning by students. A teacher needs evidence of understanding in addition to a plausible finished product.
A task-level policy
An original policy template: “For this task, AI may suggest search terms and alternative explanations. You must open the original sources, check every factual claim and write the final justification yourself. Submit a short note describing the tool, its contribution and one correction you made. An independent follow-up will ask you to apply the same reasoning to new material.” Adjust this wording to actual institutional rules, age requirements and access.
UNESCO guidance emphasizes human agency and institutional validation. Check privacy arrangements before requiring an external service, especially with school students. Provide an equivalent route without a paid account.
An original classroom example
Give students a teacher-checked AI draft containing a fabricated citation and a causal overclaim. Ask them to document both faults using supplied real source material. Grade the verification, not the fluency of the rewritten answer.