Authentic Research: Strategies for Student Search and Attribution Among AI

As long as people have been sharing ideas, they have sought to claim credit for their own work, and to respect the work of others. And for a long time, the technological limitations of sharing ideas largely reinforced the that social contract. 

Developments in AI tools complicate traditional research instruction. Educators naturally want students to build the necessary skills for authenticating and communicating research, both in the classroom and in their future careers. Unethical use of AI threatens to bypass credit, and obliviate the skills students would ordinarily acquire through reading and writing about unfamiliar topics.

The Information Literacy exercises in this guide allow students to practice research thoroughly and ethically, even when applying AI tools to some part of the process. These will drive students to consider the harms, hazards, and opportunities that AI tools pose to the information ecosystem, and spur critical thinking about what they should do about it.   

You can familiarize your participants with the documented costs or harms of the investment in AI tools with critical articles, or models such as this:

The Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education contains six threshold concepts, or "frames" that librarians typically apply to lessons.

They are:

Authority Is Constructed and Contextual
Information Creation as a Process
Information Has Value
Research as Inquiry
Scholarship as Conversation
Searching as Strategic Exploration

Applying an individual frame to a lesson allows the librarian and disciplinary faculty member to find common grounds for collaboration, establishing how information literacy concepts best apply to the outcomes of disciplinary courses and programs. There is no established order of frames, but an argument can be made for employing certain frames to target student needs at different stages of their development as budding student researchers.  For example, students who are early in their college journey may benefit most from a lesson centered on Research as Inquiry that resists charging ahead to the outcomes of search, retrieval, and composition. It focuses instead on the structure of the research questions asked by the student, and the implications of related questioning in the greater world of research.