SPIRAL integration of generative AI in an undergraduate creative media course: effects on self-efficacy and career outcome expectations

2025-05-24

AI Summary

This study addresses how pedagogical strategies for generative AI integration influence students’ self-efficacy and career interest in higher education. In a fall 2023 undergraduate creative media course, we introduced SPIRAL—a novel, three-stage instructional framework prioritizing “skills-first, AI-integration-second, ethics-pervasive.” Employing a mixed-methods design, we conducted longitudinal surveys (n = full cohort) to track self-efficacy trajectories and in-depth interviews (n = 9) with thematic analysis to examine cognitive and vocational identity shifts. Results indicate significant gains in creative media practice and generative AI tool-use self-efficacy; however, ethical AI use efficacy varied across individuals. Most students demystified AI, and career expectations shifted toward openness or remained neutral. The study contributes the first generative AI pedagogical framework explicitly centered on competency development and ethical internalization, empirically validating its dual supportive impact on psychological self-efficacy and vocational identity formation.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Artificial General Intelligence
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

Computing education and computing students are rapidly integrating generative AI, but we know relatively little about how different pedagogical strategies for intentionally integrating generative AI affect students' self-efficacy and career interests. This study investigates a SPIRAL integration of generative AI (Skills Practiced Independently, Revisited with AI Later), implemented in an introductory undergraduate creative media and technology course in Fall 2023 (n=31). Students first developed domain skills for half the semester, then revisited earlier material integrating using generative AI, with explicit instruction on how to use it critically and ethically. We contribute a mixed methods quantitative and qualitative analysis of changes in self-efficacy and career interests over time, including longitudinal qualitative interviews (n=9) and thematic analysis. We found positive changes in both students' creative media self-efficacy and generative AI use self-efficacy, and mixed changes for ethical generative AI use self-efficacy. We also found students experienced demystification, transitioning from initial fear about generative AI taking over their fields and jobs, to doubting AI capability to do so and/or that society will push back against AI, through personal use of AI and observing others' use of AI vicariously. For career interests, our SPIRAL integration of generative AI use appeared to have either a neutral or positive influence on students, including widening their perceived career options, depending on their view of how AI would influence the career itself. These findings suggest that careful pedagogical sequencing can mitigate some potential negative impacts of AI, while promoting ethical and critical AI use that supports or has a neutral effect on students' career formation. To our knowledge our SPIRAL integration strategy applied to generative AI integration is novel.

Problem

• How pedagogical strategies affect students' self-efficacy and career interests
• Impact of SPIRAL AI integration on creative media self-efficacy
• Effects of AI on students' career expectations and ethical use

Innovation

• SPIRAL integration of generative AI in education
• Skills first, AI integration later approach
• Mixed methods analysis of self-efficacy changes