Using genAI to create research tools in education: affordances and pitfalls
Apr 1, 2026 — 12 p.m. to 1 p.m.
Join us for the next event in our Research Conversations Series entitled “Using genAI to create research tools in education: affordances and pitfalls” with Claude Quevillon Lacasse and Sophie Brand. Register for this event happening on April 1, 2026 at 12 PM.
Description
Increasingly, educators, researchers and students are discovering innovative ways to use generative artificial intelligence (genAI) to support them in their tasks. As an example, images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to enhance the quality and effectiveness of foreign language (FL) learning (Vigna-Taglianti, 2024). However, the use of genAI for research purposes may pose challenges (Beghetto et al., 2025). For a listening comprehension task in French, we created a picture-matching task in which learners were asked to match an audio fragment to one of the four presented pictures (Quevillon Lacasse & Brand, in progress). Pictures were generated with Microsoft Copilot. We detected several issues raised in the literature, including reasoning (compositionality of objects, counts, spatial relations), knowledge (about the world or domains), bias (in demographic representation), and alignment (image-text alignment) (Lee et al., 2023). In this Special Research Conversation, we invite participants in a discussion around the strengths and weaknesses of the use of genAI for developing research tools in education.
Claude Quevillon Lacasse, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa.
Claude Quevillon Lacasse is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa. She completed a Ph.D. in Education and a Master’s in Language Didactics at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Her research interests include grammar and writing didactics, particularly through children’s literature, the development of bi-/plurilingual competencies, the role of meta-/interlinguistic awareness in language learning, integrated language didactics, and teacher education. She is also the current French-language editor of the Canadian Journal of Education (CJE).
Sophie Brand, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor at the Radboud Teachers Academy in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Her research interests focus on the role of meta-/interlinguistic awareness in language learning, in particular on the role of metaphonological awareness in learning comprehension and production skills in French as a foreign/second language. She is also interested in the use of multilingual repertoires by Dutch students in their everyday communication in border regions.