Join us on Friday, October 17, 2025 at 2:00 PM EASTERN for a conversation with Julia Mellary (University of Guelph) about the relationship between undergraduate students’ achievement goal orientations and their use of Generative AI.

Can’t attend live? No problem! Register anyway, and we’ll send you the recording to watch at your convenience.

The widespread availability of generative-AI (GenAI) tools has disrupted higher education, offering both opportunities to support and to undermine student learning. In this session, we will share findings from a study exploring how undergraduate students' achievement goal orientations (AGO)—whether they are motivated to learn (mastery), or demonstrate their competence (performance)—influenced how they used GenAI on a concept map assignment. We found that students who were more performance-oriented were more likely to offload work required to make their concept maps to GenAI. We will discuss how these findings can inform instructional practice and present evidence-based strategies to help influence students' goal orientations.

Julia Mellary (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Guelph, working with Dr. Dan Grunspan in the Social Networks and Pedagogy (SNAP) Lab. Her passion for discipline-based education research (DBER) began as an undergraduate, where she explored how prior educational experiences shape instructors' and undergraduate students’ beliefs about teaching. As a graduate student, Julia's research focuses on the role of student motivation on use of GenAI. Julia has been a member of SABER since 2021 and currently serves as the Professional Development Co-Chair on DBER-SiT (Scholars in Training).