Students’ Perception of Using ChatGPT in Counseling and Mental Health Education: The Benefits and Challenges

Abstract

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot that has expanded in popularity among users in several fields. It could transform education and support achieving sustainable development goals. Providing counseling and mental health services is a vital national goal for maintaining sustainable goals. As evidence of innovative technology’s ability to support sustainability in the digital era, no study has been found to investigate ChatGPT in counseling and mental health education based on students’ perceptions and experiences. Consequently, this study aimed to explore undergraduates’ perceptions in terms of the benefits and challenges of using ChatGPT in counseling and mental health education. The study adopted a descriptive quantitative approach using a purposive sample comprising 210 respondents who enrolled in the counseling and mental health program at the University of Jordan and experienced ChatGPT in their learning. The results reported that 81.9 percent of respondents perceived ChatGPT as a beneficial learning tool for counseling and mental health (M = 4.10); they perceived their ability to support most of the primary counseling skills and therapeutic conditions as the counseling dispositions and behaviors expected for reflection on meaning skills, empathic care, setting boundaries with colleagues, openness to feedback, congruence and genuineness, ability to record-keeping and task completion, and non-verbal skills. Furthermore, the findings reported that students experienced moderate challenges and concerns while utilizing ChatGPT (M = 3.21). The study’s findings suggest educators in counseling and mental health employ ChatGPT in the teaching and learning process. In addition, it proposes that decision-makers at the University of Jordan consider student concerns about ChatGPT.

Robotic Mental Well-being Coaches for the Workplace

“…Specifically, our results show that they perceived the robotic coach was perpetuating social stereotypes and biases such as gender stereotypes. These findings are in line with a previous study in which undergraduate students interacted with ChatGPT in Arabic language, and ChatGPT generated data in the context of counseling and mental health was not suitable for Arabic society, customs, traditions, and culture [36]. This could have been attributed to the bias in the training data as reported previously in a study that focused on bias of ChatGPT in American society [37].…”

ChatGPT as a Digital Co-Educator: Promoting Students' Responsible and Ethical Use of OpenAI tools in Educational Contexts

“…An examination of the collected information showed that students had a favorable opinion of using ChatGPT. Nevertheless, students' experiences utilizing ChatGPT in the counseling and mental health education domains have not yet been extensively covered in the scholarly literature on ChatGPT (Ajlouni et al, 2023).…”

“…ChatGPT exhibits signi cant potential in the eld of education by giving students access to tutoring and support, enabling customized learning, delivering research help, and elevating student engagement (Ajlouni et al, 2023;Biswas, 2023). Furthermore, ChatGPT responds to certain queries, makes information retrieval easier, and helps with code generation, computations, and statistical analysis (Halaweh, 2023).…”

“…According to the study, students believed that attributes including motivation, engagement, and educational value distinguished ChatGPT. Furthermore, Ajlouni et al (2023) study stated that respondents found ChatGPT user-friendly, yet a signi cant percentage of them raised doubts over the accuracy of the information provided by the platform. Users should also understand the differences between idea creation, which entails creating original concepts and synthesizing them, and text production, which emphasizes writing in uent English, editing, and paraphrasing (Halaweh, 2023).…”

Can ChatGPT Match the Experts? A Feedback Comparison for Serious Game Development

“…ChatGPT has been used as a part of a collaborative design framework to simulate the human design process and it was received positively by participants [5]. Similarly, A survey study in the field of mental health shows that respondents perceive ChatGPT as a beneficial learning tool [6]. A questionnaire study of university students shows that ChatGPT is viewed in a positive manner [7].…”