The Utility of ChatGPT in Educational Research—Potential Opportunities and Pitfalls

Abstract

Background/purpose – Leveraging the latest developments in natural language processing, recent versions of ChatGPT has demonstrated astounding performance on a wide array of tasks through its ability to understand and generate human language, and respond to diverse conversational prompts. Its remarkable performance in numerous applications has also attracted researchers’ atten tion, prompting investigations into the potential utility of this AI-tool to enhance scientific work. The current paper aims to present a succinct overview of the opportunities and challenges of using ChatGPT in educational research based on the anticipations and analysis of scholars from different fields of research. Practical implications – ChatGPT is a double-edged sword with its potential benefits and caveats for scientific research. Educational researchers could benefit from the utility of ChatGPT in identifying gaps in the literature, generating new ideas and developing hypothesis, devising surveys or rating scales, conducting systematic reviews, eliminating human error in analysis of large datasets as well as drafting and editing scientific manuscripts. On the other hand, the current limitations of ChatGPT in enabling a reliable and transparent generation of content, its inability to provide accurate references or tendency to suggest non-existent resources, and incompatibility with the current ethical and legal obligations of academic publishing warrants cautious and meticulous endeavor of educational researchers. Conclusion – The current era has witnessed groundbreaking advancements in AI-based technologies, which will for sure act as precursor for the development of more-developed AI-systems that could overcome the recent shortcomings of ChatGPT in aiding scientific research. Till then, scientists working in the education field should continue striving to understand its potential to advance any aspect of their scientific quest, and collaborate to formulate guidelines and principles to enable the ethical and responsible integration of these new technologies into scientific research and publishing.