Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education

Concept for Citing the Use of Generative AI tools

There no definitive way to cite the use of Gen AI tools. I know some faculty want to see the Prompt and the iterative process and some want student to acknowledge the use of the tool. The issue, any one session cannot be recreated since each use provides different responses. So I think context of assignment/research decide the citation. How much of the citation will help you as an faculty member and how much will help a student later when she may want to create something similar?

For example a student used it to create survey questions, not citing an article, so the faculty member can decide how much info for the prompt you want. It could be only the initial prompt for the session OR the prompt with a brief explanation (this option reminds me of a humanities paper footnote citation).

The first citation is from APA, the second and third are new ideas of citing.

APA version.


Idea #1 - Tool name and version (YYYY, MM DD). Prompt. Company name, Prompt/Conversation URL.

  • ChatGPT 3.5. (2024, Mar 14). Please help me write research survey questions on water usage in San José [initial prompt]. OpenAI, URL

Idea #2 Tool name and version (YYYY, MM DD). Prompt with explanation. Company name, Prompt/Conversation URL.

  • Claude 3.0. (2024, Mar 14). Please help me write research survey questions on water usage in San José with the target population of people living in working class neighborhoods [initial prompt]. This iterative process, working with Sage's Blue Book on Interview Questions, helped me craft survey 10 questions based on the in the area. Anthropic, URL