Writing can be difficult, equal parts overwhelming and challenging.
Writing can be difficult, equal parts overwhelming and challenging. No wonder so many students are turning to AI and the time-saving appeal of ChatGPT, which can print entire papers in seconds. It saves them from procrastination jams and dreaded late-night hours, magically freeing up more time for other pursuits like, say, … doomsday spinning.
Of course, no one learns to be a better writer when someone else (or some AI bot) does the work for them. The question is whether chatbots can evolve into decent writing teachers or coaches that students actually want to consult to improve their writing, rather than just use as shortcuts.
Maybe.
Jennifer Mayer, an assistant professor at the University of Vienna in Austria, has been researching how AI bots can be used to improve student writing for several years. in an interview with The Hechinger Reporthe explained why he’s wary of AI’s ability to make us better writers and is still experimenting with how to use the new technology effectively.
It’s all about timing
Meyer says that just because ChatGPT is available 24/7 doesn’t mean students should consult it early in the writing process. Instead, Meyer believes students will generally learn more if they write a first draft on their own.
That’s when AI can be most useful, he believes. With some prompting, the chatbot can provide immediate written feedback tailored to each student’s needs. A student may need to learn to write shorter sentences. Another may struggle with story structure and outlines. AI can theoretically meet the individual needs of an entire class faster than a human teacher.
In Meyer’s experiments, he introduced AI only after the first draft was done as part of the review process. A: 2,024 studieshe randomly assigned 200 German high school students to receive artificial intelligence feedback after writing an English essay draft.. Their revised essays were stronger than 250 students who were also told to revise but did not receive AI help.
In surveys, those who received AI feedback also said they were more motivated to rewrite than those who did not receive feedback. That motivation is extremely important. Often students are not in the mood to rewrite, and without revisions students cannot become better writers.
Meyer doesn’t see his experience as proof that AI is a great writing teacher. He did not compare this to how the student’s writing improved after the human feedback. His experiment compared only AI feedback to no feedback.
Most importantly, a single dose of AI writing feedback was not enough to increase students’ writing skills. Second, on a fresh essay topic, students who had previously received AI feedback did not write better than students who had not been assisted by AI.
It’s unclear how many rounds of AI feedback will be needed to permanently improve a student’s writing skills, rather than just helping revise an existing essay.
And Meyer doesn’t know if a student will want to continue discussing writing with an AI bot over and over again. Perhaps the students were willing to participate in this experiment because it was new, but they could soon tire of it. That’s next on Meyer’s research agenda.
MIT Viral Research
A much smaller MIT study published earlier this year echoes Meyer’s theory. “Your brain on ChatGPT“It went viral because it seemed to say that using ChatGPT to write an essay helps students’ brains be less engaged. Researchers found that students who wrote an essay without any online tools had stronger brain connectivity and activity than students who used AI or turned to Google to search for source materials.. (At the time of writing, using Google wasn’t as bad for the brain as AI).
Although those results did titlesthere was more to the experience. Students who initially wrote their essays were later given ChatGPT to improve them. That transition to ChatGPT stimulated brain activity unlike the original writing process by neuroscientists.
These studies add to the evidence that a little delay in AI, after some forethought and design, can be the sweet spot for learning. That’s something researchers need to test more.
However, Meyer remains concerned that AI tools are too weak for writers and for young children who haven’t developed basic writing skills. “This could be a real problem,” Meyer said. “Using these tools too early can be harmful.”
Cheated your way into learning?
Meyer doesn’t think it’s always a bad idea for students to ask ChatGPT to write for them.
Just as young artists learn to paint by copying masterpieces in museums, so students can learn to write better by copying good writing. (The late great New Yorker editor John Bennett taught Jill to write this way. He called it “copywork” and encouraged his journalism students to do it every week, copying at length the words of legendary writers, not AI.)
Meyer suggests that students ask ChatGPT to write an essay that meets their teacher’s assignment and grading criteria. The next step is key. If students pretend it’s their own work and present it, that’s cheating. They also offloaded cognitive work to technology and learned nothing.
But the AI essay could theoretically be an effective learning tool if students study argumentation, organizational structure, sentence structure, and vocabulary before writing a new draft in their own words. Ideally, the next assignment should do better if students learn through that analysis and master the style and technique of the model essay, Meyer said.
“My hypothesis would be as long as there’s a cognitive effort involved, as long as there’s a lot of time on task, and as long as there’s critical thinking about the outcome, then it should be good,” Meyer said.
Ad review
Everyone likes a compliment. But too much praise can stifle learning just as too much water can keep flowers from blooming.
ChatGPT tends to be heaped with praise and often starts with a casual flattery like “Great job!” even when the student’s writing needs a lot of work. In Meyer’s test of whether AI feedback could improve students’ writing, he deliberately told ChatGPT not to start with praise and instead go straight to constructive criticism.
His thrifty approach drew praise from a 2023 written study about what motivates students to revise. The research found that when teachers started with general praise, students got the false impression that their work was already good enough, so they didn’t put in the extra effort to rewrite.
In Meyer’s experiments, feedback without praise was effective in getting students to revise and improve their essays. But he didn’t draw a direct competition between the two approaches, no praise vs. praise, so we don’t know for sure which is more effective when students interact with AI.
Being stingy with praise rubs true teachers wrong. After Meyer removed the praise from feedback, teachers told her they wanted it back. “They wondered why the feedback was so negative,” Meyer said. “They wouldn’t do it that way.”
Meyer and other researchers may one day solve the puzzle of how to turn AI chatbots into great writing coaches. But whether students will have the willpower or desire to turn down an essay written on the fly is another question. As long as ChatGPT continues to let students take the easy way out, it’s human nature to do so.
This story was produced The Hechinger Reporta non-profit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education and reviewed and disseminated Stacker.
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