Harnessing Generative AI to Facilitate Epistemic Understanding of Students in Scientific Inquiry

This study explores the potential of generative AI (GenAI) to facilitate elementary students’ epistemic understanding in scientific inquiry. Utilizing the Korean version of Views About Scientific Inquiry for Elementary school students (VASI-E) instrument, we collected 560 responses from 80 fourth-grade students in Korea and implemented a series of prompt engineering strategies within ChatGPT-4o. We developed GenAI prompts for scoring and feedback aligned with established epistemic frameworks, ca