A New Era of Learning: Considerations for ChatGPT as a Tool to Enhance Statistics and Data Science Education

I find that the authors' suggestions are a wonderful starting point, and instructors can tailor this prototype to fit the needs of their students and learning objectives.

It inspired me to do the following: One class I teach focuses on data visualization. Students need to take information from a file like a spreadsheet and use software to create powerful visuals. One thing we can do is provide an initial prompt such as “using the programming language R, create a histogram of the carat variable from the well-known diamonds dataset.” ChatGPT can create some nice code for such a task, which students can then copy and paste, then modify. Requesting that students start with the AI-powered solution helps to showcase how AI can support and reinforce the acquisition of content knowledge. They see the answer to the questions:

• What does the code look like to create a histogram?

• How do I access a particular dataset in R?

It also helps students to consider synthesis, by providing instructors a tool for synthesis.

• Now that you have working histogram code, make a histogram for a different dataset (that ChatGPT does not know).

• Make your histogram more complex in a meaningful way. (As an instructor, you could even provide some examples of the types of complexity students might add.)

After this activity is finished, you can demonstrate to students that AI certainly helped to start the process, but there were a few adjustments that helped provide a complete solution to the problem at hand.