Work-in-Progress: Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) with Generative AI in a Computer Science Course

This work-in-progress innovative practice paper describes a novel integration of Generative AI with Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs). CUREs integrate research activities into the curriculum, allowing all students in a course to participate in inquiry-based research projects. Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are advanced AI designed to generate human-like responses by processing natural language inputs. These applications leverage machine learning models to produce outputs that can assist users in a variety of tasks from writing to coding. The integration of Generative AI with CURE had been adopted in a text-based machine learning course during the Fall 2023 semester. A comparative analysis had been conducted on student survey responses from Fall 2022 and Fall 2023 to evaluate the effectiveness of Generative AI in a CURE integrated course. Descriptive statistics and statistical tests were conducted to assess differences in student perceptions between the two semesters. Although the differences were not statistically significant, the results indicate a promising trend towards improved student perceptions of both the overall course effectiveness and the benefits of Generative AI in enhancing various aspects of the research process, especially the literature review.