Integrating AI into a History Research Project: Lessons from a Recent Experiment

This talk describes how integrating AI into a history research project reshaped students’ understanding of AI’s uses and limitations, and of what historical research entails. Universities increasingly encourage students to experiment with AI, yet students often lack experience crafting effective prompts and misunderstand AI’s strengths and constraints. While existing scholarship has explored students’ attitudes toward AI, few studies examine how students' perceptions change when they are required to use AI in a sustained, structured, and rigorous way in history courses.

In fall 2025, I asked students working in teams of three to four to use AI over the course of a 2.5-month research project to refine research questions, build bibliographies, review secondary scholarship, and identify primary sources, while adhering to the AHA’s Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence Use. I surveyed students before the project began and again at multiple checkpoints to assess how using AI for this project impacted their perceptions of AI, and the work involved in producing original historical arguments.

Most students reported that they became more skeptical of AI’s utility as they worked on this project, while their understanding of historical research deepened. I will discuss the results obtained from replicating this project in fall 2026, and their implications for AI’s uses in history education.