I enjoy Larry Gonick's Cartoon Guides. A combination of an amazing repertoire of dad jokes with insites into the material expresed graphically. Unfortunately most of them do not have problems or quizzes. I decided to try chatGPT as a way to customize testing my comprehension. I am familiar with the material as I have taken courses in the subject. I wanted to share what I did, the issues I ran into and how I addressed them. Let's get started.
My first prompt was to set up a course outline:
I am an adult learner and I would like to create a course outline in environmental science based on the following headings:
1. Forests and Water
2. More Cycles
3. Evolving Systems, struggling Individuals
4. Communities Wet
5. ... And Dry
6. Let's Eat!
7. From Hunting to Planting
8. What Limitinh Factors?
9. Bye, Bye Biome!
10. Energy Webs.
11. Let's Eat Again!
12. Bright Lights, Big City
13. Pollution
14. Earth Island
The next step is to generate a quiz and take it:
Please provide a 10 question multiple choice quiz for section 1 - Forests and Water. Do not provide the answers until prompted.
Then grade the quiz:
Please provide an answer key, without explanations, for the most recent quiz.
One is likely to get some wrong answers. I would put them into fourcategories
- Did not readthe question or read all the alternatives
- Did not understand the material
- Question involved material outside the text.
- Incorrect Scoring (AKA Hallucination)
For 1 and 2 the following prompt should be useful:
Please explain the answer to question 9 of the most recent quiz
For 3 sometimes the explanation provided will provide enough information. Also searching the internet for additional material may be useful. Here are a couple sample queries:
- site:wikipedia.org carbon cycle
- site:commons.libretexts.org carbon cycle
Incorrect scoring (AKA Hallucination) requires more customization. I marked D for question 3 of Quiz 8 which was marked wrong. The question was about carrying capacity. I asked it for a definition of carrying capacity. I then prompted:
Does this contradict the answer to question 3 in the most recent quiz?
chatGPT responded:
No, the definition of carrying capacity does not contradict the answer to question 3 in the most recent quiz. Let's clarify:
How does carrying capacity relate to limiting factors?
a. It is the maximum number of individuals an environment can support without limiting factors
b. It is the total amount of resources available in an ecosystem
c. It is unaffected by limiting factors
d. It decreases as limiting factors decrease
a. It is the maximum number of individuals an environment can support without limiting factors
The answer provided is incorrect. The correct answer should be:
d. It decreases as limiting factors decrease
Carrying capacity is directly influenced by limiting factors. It is the maximum number of individuals an environment can support considering the limiting factors present. If the availability of critical resources (limiting factors) decreases, the carrying capacity of the environment will also decrease because fewer individuals can be sustained with fewer resources.
Here is the corrected quiz question and answer:
How does carrying capacity relate to limiting factors?
a. It is the maximum number of individuals an environment can support without limiting factors
b. It is the total amount of resources available in an ecosystem
c. It is unaffected by limiting factors
d. It decreases as limiting factors decrease
Correct Answer: d. It decreases as limiting factors decrease
I found the questions and related answers to be fairly easy and a bit repetitive. This may be my fault for not clarifying what level of testing I was looking for. I imagine in the corpora there are a number of texts targeted to a younger audience. I averaged 95% so I am happy with that and perhaps I underestimated how much the "Cartoon Guide to the Environment" covered.