AI Chatbot to Assist Students Applying APA (7th Edition) Style in Their Academic Writing in a Polytechnic in Singapore

Introduction

Temasek Polytechnic (TP) is an institute of higher learning (IHL) in Singapore that offers 43 diploma courses to post-secondary students. Those who have passed their GCE “O” levels or obtained a certificate from the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) can apply for a place in the polytechnic. Those with “N” levels are required to complete a one-year bridging programme before joining the polytechnic. Pre-Employment Training (PET) courses are offered to full-time students who would have recently completed their secondary or ITE education, while Continuing Education Training (CET) courses are for part-time students who are working adults.

Technology has been increasingly used for teaching and training since early 2000. Staff have been trained to use e-Learning in a blended mode for their face-to-face classes. Business Continuity Plans (BCP) stipulated by the Ministry of Education (MOE) after the SARS outbreak in 2003 required polytechnics to set aside an e-Learning week every year, where lessons are conducted fully online, off campus. These plans had to be fully deployed when the Corona Virus (CV) 19 pandemic required classes to be moved online from the April 2020 semester.

TP academic staff have been encouraged to explore the use of new technologies to enhance teaching, training and learning from the late 1990s. Since 2000, funding has been made available for staff to explore the use of specific technologies for teaching and learning, and conduct research on their effectiveness. For example, external funding could come from the National Research Foundation, the MOE Tertiary Research Fund, the Institute of Adult Learning Workforce Development Applied Research Fund, while internal funding would come from the TP Technology Enhanced Fund and Research Fund.

TP academic staff started exploring the use of educational chatbots from 2019. In June 2020, the School of Informatics and IT (IIT) received a SGD50k grant from the TP Research Fund to develop AI chatbots for two collaborator schools, namely the School of Applied Science (AS) and School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). While existing administrative TP chatbots provided students with simple answers to their queries regarding their assignments, these AI chatbots would be used to help students learn content, offering functions that would surpass the capability of the TP administrative chatbots. AI chatbots have been used for subjects such as Airline Management, Microservices, Social Media Analytics, Programming Game Engines, Network Technology, Data Analytics and Visualisation, Electronic Devices and Circuits, and even for the optional independent learning of Microsoft Excel (2016 version).

Students in academic institutions are expected to conduct research, and then cite and reference their research correctly in their writing. In TP, two citation styles are used: APA is used by students in the Humanities and Social Science, Design, and Business diploma courses, and IEEE is used by students in the Engineering, IIT and Applied Science diploma courses. Despite stipulating the use of the respective citation style for assignments, students have difficulty applying it correctly. They either make gross errors when applying the format or avoid applying it altogether. To rectify this, all first-year students were required to use the assigned citation style in their assignments for their core subject “Communication and Information Literacy” (ICOMM).

Offered by the then Centre for Communication Skills in HSS, ICOMM was initially designed for face-to-face delivery. It was quickly adapted for online learning for the April 2020 semester because the circuit breaker period of the Covid 19 pandemic meant no one was allowed on campus. Teaching materials were placed on the LMS (Blackboard) while online synchronous classes were conducted via MS teams. This arrangement continued for the next four semesters.

In early 2021, an AI Chatbot was initiated by the HSS subject leader and co-developed with an IIT development team. Named the APABot, it was designed to help students learn the APA (7^th edition) style and apply it in an assigned essay. Designed for independent, self-regulated learning (SRL), it was hoped that it would mitigate the challenges of fully online learning while greatly reducing the number of online queries for the tutor. It was trialled with first-year students from the Diploma in Psychology Studies, HSS during the April 2021 semester.

This chapter attempts to look at how the introduction of an AI chatbot could impact the application of APA (7^th edition) style in a short essay. Using the APABot required specific learning skills, namely self-regulation. Hence, the research questions were as follows: