A cross-era discourse on ChatGPT’s influence in higher education through the lens of John Dewey and Benjamin Bloom

Abstract

Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT and the related AI technology have disrupted multiple fields of society where people anticipate its pathways with a mixture of hope and fear. Among the affected fields, education, in particular, may incur one of the largest impacts in the future partly due to its nature of learning and teaching knowledge, an element that is more or less questioned by the rise of these technologies. As education can be seen as a component that determines the future of every other field of society, tools such as ChatGPT must be optimally regulated to enhance its gain or mitigate its loss. To contribute to this goal, this paper approaches the state of ChatGPT and its expected impacts on higher education through the lens of two major educational theories—John Dewey’s Reflective-Thought-and-Action model and revised Bloom’s taxonomy—aiming to propose possible evaluative criteria for the optimal usage of ChatGPT in academia. As ChatGPT is a relatively new topic of research yet a topic that requires an immediate focus due to its capabilities, this paper also aims to provide these criteria as one of the concrete starting points of future research in this field.