�鶹��Ƶ

�鶹��Ƶ’s leadership in advancing 21st-century education took another leap forward this month when several university researchers were named to a statewide project exploring the impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI) on teaching and learning in higher education classrooms.    

Funded by a State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) , the cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional project aims to promote ethical integration of AI into educational settings.  

The initiative, “,” involves 80 faculty, graduate students, and staff from multiple Virginia institutions including University of Virginia, James Madison University, Roanoke College, Bridgewater State University, and Virginia Commonwealth University.  

Amanda Bryan, an assistant professor in George �鶹��Ƶ’s and co-lead on the study, said it is “designed to test onboarding activities in increasing students’ ethical and responsible use of AI tools.” 

 The study is an example of a Mega Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, or SoTL, project. It’s one of 11 projects George �鶹��Ƶ is involved in, generating evidence of learning from multiple institutions. 

“The research team designed the activities, which we then make available to other professors to adapt to their own disciplines and provide us data on how effective the activities were in increasing ethical use of AI tools for the students,” said Bryan.  

The team also considered different levels of activities to accommodate students who were inexperienced with AI versus those who had advanced skills.  

“We took the task on ourselves that we’re asking students to do because we actually used AI to revise the activities in the ethical, responsible way that we would want students to be able to do,” said Bryan, who is conducting this project with data from students in her ENGH 302 Advanced Composition course.  

“We asked students open-ended questions, including whether they think they’re over-reliant or under-reliant on generative AI tools. That feeds directly into the next activity, which is all about under-reliance, over-reliance, and the harm of being either. We want students to find a cushy middle,” she said.  

The team got their first round of data from students in spring 2025, which showed that just providing these discussion spaces has increased students’ ethical thinking about AI use in college by more than 60%, explained Bryan.  

“We went to the institutional review boards at all the different institutions to get permission to do the research,” said Breana Bayraktar, an educational developer with George �鶹��Ƶ and one of the projects primary investigators.   

Bayraktar said thanks to the support of the SCHEV grant, they've been able to hire graduate research assistants and get undergraduates involved in organizing the collected data.  

“We support each of the institutional teams for their research objectives and collect data from students,” said Bayraktar. “There's a number of teams that have done presentations or have written projects that are either published or on the track to publication that have come out of the different research projects. With this data, we were able to make one coherent project with one survey.”  

Students in George �鶹��Ƶ’s (URSP), and .  

“The students really gain professional experience and exposure to real-world research practices. It’s very much a mentoring role with the students,” Bayraktar said.  

There is an  (OER) portion of the study, “so even after this study is complete, all of the research methods and activities we’re using are being compiled into OERs for future use under a creative commons license,” said Bryan.   

Under this SCHEV grant, George �鶹��Ƶ is hosting three conferences on AI, the last of which will be in May 2026. The grant funding goes through summer 2026.