Educators' experience and guide to scaffolding GenAI applications throughout a physiology & pharmacology undergraduate laboratory course.

One of the identified points of confusion and a barrier to students using GenAI is knowing what their professor would consider appropriate use of GenAI in a classroom setting or course framework. This creates points of friction for instructors and students as they try to navigate an ever-changing landscape, while trying to ensure work readiness skills for students. This includes development of GenAI literacy, prompt engineering as related to physiology and research, and critical thinking skills. In this paper, we suggest an innovative, two-pronged approach that scaffolds the use of GenAI in a third year physiology and pharmacology course. First, we propose an integrating centralized support for GenAI within a course through asynchronous means, demonstrating how GenAI can be used as a tool. Second, we provide a step-by-step guide, with a concrete example of using GenAI for developing a novel experimental question, a hypothesis, legitimate methodology and analysis, and critical evaluation of GenAI outputs. We also we provide a general implementation guide and logistical considerations and adaptations for other courses are discussed.

Educators' experience and guide to scaffolding GenAI applications throughout a physiology & pharmacology undergraduate laboratory course. Journal Articles