Investigating the Impact of ChatGPT on Enhancing University Students’ Critical Thinking Skills

The era of remarkable change and innovative ideas necessitate a spirit and endeavors of attention to cope with such advancements. Considering this, the current paper acts as a summary of a study that investigated the use of University students of ChatGPT responses as a method to improve their critical thinking potentials, analysis, evaluation, interpretation, problem-solving and reflection. A One-group quasi-experimental research design was used, and tools of the current study included a critical thinking scale created by the authors and several interviews which were recorded by the authors with the sample of the study. One sample of 61 university students participated in the study where they addressed a program based on assessing ChatGPT answers using a set of criteria such as authenticity, originality and referencing. The study continued for three months (one semester) where they used ChatGPT responses to check their critical thinking skills. Critical thinking skills can be encouraged as study skills with external inputs powered by ChatGPT, where students were exposed to value synthetic answers and reflect on them in terms of authenticity and referencing. Academic writing skills pre-posttests were administered to both groups. The program for using ChatGPT helped university students improve their critical thinking skills where the mean scores of the post testing surpassed the pre-testing. A list of suggestions and recommendations has been provided for additional research.