ChatGPT: Your Revision Guide Maestro

Last week my eldest daughter came to me rather stressed. She’s due to sit her history GCSE in May and cannot find revision materials for one of the units as the main textbook is out of print.

It got me thinking. Why not ask ChatGPT to write a revision guide for her? So that’s what we did (CGPT and I).?

I first downloaded the syllabus, then chose the unit that she has been struggling on (Conflict in the Middle East, 1945-95). I copy pasted the section into a document to refer to as I wrote the guide.?

I then gave ChatGPT this prompt:?

You are the writer of educational revision guides. You writing is clear, accurate, easy to read and pitched at the correct grade level. I will give you a set of criteria within which you will write the draft for each section of a revision guide aimed at 16 year old students. Your writing will be detailed, intelligent, and suitable for the age group and level that is specified.?Begin by asking me for the criteria you will need in order to write the revision guide.?

I then added in the criteria: GCSE History 9-1, Edexcel Syllabus, aimed at grade 9 (as my daughter is very bright) and the name of the unit. I added in each sub unit that needed to be covered direct from the syllabus.

ChatGPT wrote me the chapter outline and covered every point in exact order. From there, I asked it to write a further breakdown, and from there to draft each section of the guide.?

It wrote exceptionally well, digging deep into the subject, bringing in masses of detail, and presenting it in a clean and easy to understand way. The ChatGPT style lends itself well to this style of writing, perhaps more so than anything more creative. I also asked it to provide further reading and revision questions for each chapter. I was not disappointed by the result.?

The challenge at the moment (and I shouldn’t really complain as it took no time at all compared to writing from scratch) is that it is a little slow and glitchy when you’re working with ChatGPT-4, and you need to keep asking it to ‘keep going’ when it stops half way through a sentence. At least I do, but that may be due to the dodgy internet where I live. However, the quality of the writing and detail far surpasses GPT-3.5 so it’s worth the slower speed of writing.?

For school level subjects, which are by nature less specialist than, say, PhD level with its narrower data sets, the accuracy of the information ChatGPT presents is likely to be higher because the data set is broader. For history there is simply a lot of material out there that the model can draw from: and the same for most school subjects. Ask it to write revision guides for more obscure poets and it struggles, but for broader topics like history, from what I can see it excels. Teachers should look carefully at this as a legitimate additional method of creating materials that are precisely matched to what students need to know and the level they are aiming to achieve.?Caveat emptor of course, but that is the same for all sources.

But why not take it a stage further? Why do we need to be writing revision guides, when we can teach students to write their own? After all, all I did was input prompts and finesse the model to produce writing at a greater level of granularity. My daughter could have done the same and possibly made it better as she more precisely knows what she is struggling with.

By providing students with a series of prompts, ChatGPT can be instructed to produce a range of resources to support revision and broader learning. It may be prone to occasional errors, but you show me a teacher who isn't. Everyone is fallible and AI is not immune to lapses. But from I can see, it's getting better all the time.

It’s one to take seriously and consider across all subjects and ages. And it calls into question, if we take things to their logical conclusion, how teachers will need to adapt to how easily students are now able to access increasingly accurate learning materials just by knowing how to talk to the AI.?