Author Description

In the past ten years, applications of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) have found rapidly growing use in medicine, science, and daily life. Large language models (LLMs) opened up new avenues in particular for education. LLMs have been used to create interactive educational content for students, stimulate their curiosity, generate code explanations, and develop assessment questions. Additionally, LLMs been applied for language practice, anxiety alleviation, and feedback provision. In higher education, LLMs have shown potential for assisting in medical exam preparation and clinical decision-making. In school education, LLMs can help teachers with automated evaluation of student responses and respective adaptive feedback. More recently LLM-based applications such as chatGPT have been used to generate teaching materials or assessment tasks across different subjects. The fields’ understanding of the effects of the use of LLM-based applications in classroom teaching, however, is still in its infancy. GAI tools may help solving a range of tasks in education, in particular with respect to teachers’ and students’ and teachers’ efforts to generate content. However, it is critical that teachers and students do not overly rely on GAI generated solutions but instead critically assess each solution. Students should furthermore not use GAI tools to avoid investing relevant mental effort to create mental models or, more broadly, build-up competencies.