Tamara Tate, PhD
Tamara Tate is Associate Director of the Digital Learning Lab.

Tamara leads the Lab's work on generative AI and writing. Her research focuses on technology-supported learning, school-based digital literacy interventions, and analysis of digital writing. As the PI of a NSF-funded grant, she is studying the use of generative AI in undergraduate writing courses. She also studies secondary student writing as a member of the IES-funded national  WRITE Center and is part of the Elementary Computing for All team.

Tamara received her B.A. in English and her Ph.D. in Education at U.C. Irvine and her J.D. at U.C. Berkeley. 

Tamara can be reached at tatet@uci.edu

In the news...

​Given that MLLMs may fail to support their claims with reasons or evidence, this gives teachers the opportunity to demonstrate the need for critical reasoning. “Students need to think about who said what and why in a given response,” Tate says.

New NSF Grant!
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Generative AI in Engineering Writing Courses

This project aims to serve the national interest by developing an engineering writing curriculum that incorporates generative artificial intelligence (AI). Pursuant to the NSF program for Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Directorate for STEM Education (IUSE: EDU), Engaged Student Learning (Level 1), this project is designed to improve undergraduate teaching and learning for engineering students and enable them to be skillful writers and knowledgeable and ethical users of AI. Writing and communication are crucial to engineers and new generative AI tools such as ChatGPT pose both significant opportunities and challenges for helping engineering students become better writers and communicators. This project thus seeks to study the integration of AI writing tools in an undergraduate engineering writing course and create open-source products to help instructors integrate AI writing tools into such courses. The project seeks to maximize the critically necessary digital and AI literacy of emerging engineers to foster writing and communication both in college and in their future careers. It is imperative that engineers both understand the potential pitfalls of generative AI related to incorrect information, bias, privacy, and intellectual property rights, and learn to write well with generative AI. The knowledge to understand when and why to use generative AI in writing and the skills to write prompts that generate useful text and to ethically make use of those texts to support one’s own writing should be developed in all engineering students, regardless of socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, or gender.

Comparing the Quality of Human and ChatGPT Feedback on Students' Writing
Steiss, Tate, Graham, Cruz, Hebert, Wang, Moon, Tseng, & Warschauer

Educational Research and AI- Generated Writing: 
Confronting the Coming Tsunami,
Tate, Doroudi, Ritchie, Xu, & Warschauer

Presentations

  • November 2023: AI Symposium.  Santa Clara County Office of Education, San Jose, CA [SLIDES]
  • October 2023: Navigating the Brave New World of Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT: How to Benefit the Instructional Classroom. CCCCI Fall 2023 Conference. San Diego, CA [Handout]
  • October 2023: Think Like a Robot: AI and Disciplinary Literacy.   AI and Education: Navigating the Mind Fields. Orange County Department of Education. Costa Mesa, CA [SLIDES]
  • September 2023: Evolving Practices for Instructors in the Age of Generative AI. Friday SLO Talks. California Outcomes Assessment Coordinators Hub. [SLIDES] [Recording]
  • September 2023: Evolving Practices for Instructors in the Age of Generative AI. UCI Teach Day, Irvine, CA [SLIDES]
  • September 2023: Using Digital Tools for Researching and Writing.  Academic Writing Workshop, University of California, Irvine School of Education. Irvine, CA [SLIDES]
  • July 2023: Researching Writing.  Presented at Pens & Pixels: Generative AI in Education. Available online at https://www.pensandpixels.org/conference.html

New Series on AI in Education

The release and rapid diffusion of ChatGPT and other large language models
has shed a broad public spotlight on the potentially transformative effect of
generative artificial intelligence in education. Scholars and educators around
the world are pondering how these new forms of generative AI are changing
both what students need to learn and how they should be taught it.
This Cambridge Elements series will address cutting-edge topics on
generative AI in education. The series will cover a wide range of perspectives,
from educational theory, to research reviews, to implications for practitioners.
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Connections will be drawn from prior uses of AI and digital learning to the
new affordances and challenges of large language models. Diverse subject
areas, from language and literacy to computer science, will be addressed,
as will a broad swath of educational levels from preschool through higher
education and beyond. Throughout, the series will take an in-depth critical
perspective, highlighting the exciting potential of generative AI while also
weighing challenges of privacy, ethics, and equity. This will be a must-read
series for educators considering how to make use of AI in the classroom as
well as for scholars seeking to keep abreast of research innovations in this
major new area of inquiry.
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Interested in writing for us? Contact the Series Editors at GenAIeditors@gmail.com
WRITE Center

Interested in writing in history classes?  Visit the IES-funded WRITE Center website for great resources on writing, history, and our work on a new intervention. The WRITE (Writing Research to Improve Teaching and Evaluation) Center for Secondary Students researches academic writing, placing special emphasis on source-based argument writing in history, and provides national leadership and outreach activities to support improvement of secondary writing research and practice related to academic writing across the curriculum. The Digital Learning Lab is supporting the WRITE Center through analysis of writing corpora and development of digital tools to support the teaching and learning of source-based argument writing in history. 

Elementary Computing For All

A collaboration between with university researchers and K-12 practitioners to promote computational thinking for multilingual students in elementary schools.  Visit the website for more information and resources including curriculum for teachers. 

​Online Learning Research Center

Created in spring 2020 to communicate research-based information about online learning to those forced online due to emergency distance learning, the OLRC’s website provides access to 5 years’ NSF-funded research about online learning conducted by the Digital Learning Lab. Whether a first-time online instructor looking to get started, a veteran seeking to improve online teaching, a student seeking ways to improve online study skills, or a scholar or educational leader seeking the latest research on online learning, the OLRC.US site was designed to provide evidence-based resources to improve achievement and equity in online learning.

Slides from our 2023 AERA presentation, Equity Online.