ISTELive 24: How to Counter Misuse of AI Writing in Grades 7-12

For all the public hype about inserting generative artificial intelligence into every facet of education — evident by perusing the list of presentations at this year’s International Society for Technology in Education conference in Denver — many English teachers remain wary. The ability of a computer to generate language for students who are meant to be learning it themselves is not a problem teachers can easily dismiss. In response to a newly emerging status quo, some of them are showing what’s possible by limiting AI to highly selective, strategic uses and combining it with traditional best practices for teaching.

WHY STUDENTS USE AI

In a presentation Wednesday focused on addressing this problem for middle and high school English classes, Sarah Mauel, an instructional technology trainer from Tempe Union High School District in Arizona, opened with suggestions for when AI could be most useful. She recommended students use it for preliminary research, summarizing complex texts, composing multiple versions of a text to compare and contrast them, and certain kinds of feedback — asking if an essay’s tone is neutral, for example, or asking for ideas to make it more concise, or to flag instances of passive voice.

Mauel’s colleague Amy Miller, also an instructional technology trainer from Tempe Union, summarized AI’s best uses in her class as being for research, synthesizing information, and using different tones and levels of vocabulary. She said the more objective the task, the more helpful AI can be; and conversely, the more subjective, the less helpful.

“We need to figure out why students are using AI to write,” she said. “Some of the common things that we found when we talked about it were lack of writing skills, they’re insecure about their writing, there are struggles with time management, confusion about the topic, they might be missing organizational and grammar skills, they might have a poor work ethic and not know how to get started, they might lack access to resources, which is a really common one in some of our schools, and then just home and personal life as well.”

Miller added that AI is not just a crutch for under-achievers. It’s also a shortcut for high-performing students looking for the fastest or surest route to a good grade.

“They have a bar set for themselves, and if the AI response is better than what they wrote, and they want the A, they’re just going to turn in what gets them the A. They’re very grade-driven,” she said. “Not all teachers allow revisions and resubmissions. Not all teachers allow late work. Those two policies alone can completely change a student’s perspective on whether or not they’re going to be tempted to use AI, because if you’re not going to accept it late, and they don’t have any time, they’re going to go ahead and do it.”

WHAT TEACHERS CAN DO

One teacher in the audience said offering smaller deadlines more often, rather than one looming deadline for an enormous essay, helps to curb some of those habits. Miller agreed, making the point that students need to be able to write full-length essays, but those aren’t necessary for every lesson. She said sometimes short bursts of writing can suffice, pointing to exercises from AP Language classes called “rhetorical precis” — bite-sized writing assignments that allow students to demonstrate they can identify and analyze components of a text.

Miller continued down a list of best practices:

• Frame instructions as questions, or give students a question-based outline to work from, because they like questions and naturally try to answer them. For example, rather than telling students to summarize a quote, ask them what the quote is basically saying.

• To build student confidence and encourage discourse, use “mini Socratics,” or scaled-down versions of Socratic seminars, in which groups of three to five students collaborate to share ideas on each other’s essay topics.

• During the peer-review processes, offer students a choice in how they want to receive feedback.
  
  “The student who really loves red-line editing, maybe that’s what they’re choosing, that they’re going to go through and help with some sentence structure,” Miller said. “But maybe another student just wants to look and see whether or not they understand the content and whether or not it’s clear and concise.”
  
  A teacher in the audience also recommended floopedu.com as a useful free website for anonymous peer review and feedback.

• To encourage critical thinking, have students do targeted annotations so they can work their way through difficult material and actively engage with the text.

• During the research phase of an essay, have students do an annotated bibliography. This can provide evidence of critical reading, a summary of main points, and justifications for using those sources.
  
  “Have them turn (an annotated bibliography) in, and then if they’re comfortable with that source, they’re going to be more likely to actually use it in their writing, because they understand it,” Miller said.

• Use AI only in small doses and when needed. Don’t have students put their entire essay into an AI for feedback.

• Use AI-resistant prompts. Ask students for subjective explanations, evaluative critical thinking, personal experiences, or reflections on their own writing or thinking.

HOW TO HANDLE CHEATING

If a student does turn in AI writing as their own, Miller advised not to assume their intentions or shame them. She suggested approaching them from a position of support, taking into consideration how much they used AI, and giving them three options: to meet personally and answer questions about their writing, to submit a new assignment, or take a zero.

Miller also stressed the importance of communicating the rules clearly with families, including defining AI-generated writing, describing acceptable uses, and outlining disciplinary measures for specific numbers of violations.

In any case, she said, the genie’s out of the bottle: Technology is getting better at writing while students have gotten worse, and they need guidance from educators to turn things around.

“[AI] is gonna be there. We have to go back to best practices in teaching,” she said. “They’re not coming in your high school classroom knowing how to write a complete sentence. I don’t know where that happened, but somewhere it happened, so they’re still coming in with pretty big deficiencies, even more so after the pandemic. Big deficiencies.”