How to combat the misuse of AI in student writing

Key points:

As ai becomes firmly established in classrooms, an important and persistent question is when and how students can appropriately use it. It only takes a few seconds to plug a writing prompt into a generative ai tool and receive a completed assignment. Rather than banning generative ai tools, it is critical for teachers to show students how and when it is appropriate to use ai in student writing.

Bottom line: When students are confident in their writing skills, they are less tempted to turn directly to ai to generate a written assignment. Teachers can then demonstrate how and when it is appropriate for students to use ai to their advantage.

During a ISTELive 24 sessionsSarah Mauel, Amy Miller, and Tahlia Remer, educational technology coaches at Arizona’s Tempe Union High School District, shared strategies to help students improve their writing skills, thereby boosting their self-confidence, and shared examples of how to properly use ai tools in student writing assignments.

It is generally easy to determine whether students have used an ai tool to generate a response to a written assignment or to generate an entire essay. Most importantly, the writing will be nothing like any of the other assignments submitted by the student. Teachers can also search:

• Impeccable writing: The grammar is almost error-free and the longer the answer, the more inflated sentences repeat the same concept.
• Lack of original/authentic thinking: ai can only compose what it finds on the Internet
• Advanced Language: Using uncommon vocabulary terms when trying to write at a higher level, or using obvious informal language to lighten the tone.
• The format and structure are traditional and robotic: Consider what a 5-paragraph essay typically looks like when using an outline.
• Using lists or outlines: ai likes to create subtopics, label them, and then provide encyclopedic-like answers.

The advent of generative ai also raises the question of plagiarism and how educators can (and should) rethink plagiarism and cheating.

Teachers should include an ai usage table (such as ai-cheating/” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>this one from Get rid of that textbook) with their course descriptions and have clear discussions with parents and students about when the use of ai is acceptable and when it is not.

Before lamenting the need for students to rely entirely on ai, it is important to identify and address the reasons why students use ai to write. Those reasons may include: lack of writing skills, insecurity around writing skills, difficulties with time management, confusion about the topic, lack of grammar and organizational skills, lack of motivation or interest, lack of real-world relevance, poor work ethic, lack of access to resources, and stress from family and personal life.

It's important to make the writing process less intimidating.

“Accepting late work and allowing revisions can determine whether students use ai,” Miller said. “If you're not going to accept late work and they're not going to have time (to do the work), they're going to go ahead and use ai.”

Reviewing the steps of the writing process, particularly as students still struggle with learning losses post-pandemic, can help them develop stronger writing skills so they don’t immediately turn to ai to complete writing assignments.

Offering students different options through which to demonstrate their understanding and writing skills is another way to discourage them from automatically using ai.

“We have to rethink the entire essay as the end-all, be-all for assessing students' writing skills,” Miller said. “It's intimidating. We can assess their understanding of what they read and their ability to write through shorter writing periods. “I still think there is value in (the full essay), but they don’t have to do it all the time.”

For an in-depth exploration of different writing tasks to help students develop confidence and demonstrate skills, watch the video. recorded version of the session. Some examples include small group brainstorming sessions and “Mini Socratics,” gamification methods that award students points for each component they have completed in a task, small group peer reviews where students reflect on each other's ideas instead of correcting mistakes, and more.

While students must develop their own writing skills and capabilities, ai isn’t going away, so it’s worth identifying things ai can do in the writing classroom. ai can help personalize content for students based on their knowledge level, learning speed, and desired learning goals; provide individual learning experiences outside of the classroom; give students quick answers to questions to save time; and serve as a 24/7 chatbot to provide equity in learning, Mauel said.

Creating assignments that require things that ai is not good at is one way to prevent widespread use of ai by students. For example, ai is good at conducting research, synthesizing information, using different levels of vocabulary, and adopting a particular tone. ai is not good at offering subjective explanations, evaluative critical thinking, sharing personal experiences, and offering personal reflections. (MagicSchool.ai offers ai/tools/ai-resistant-assignment-suggestions”>a tool (to make tasks resistant to ai).

Educators can also use ai to design assignments for special populations of students, including creating writing prompts tailored to different student needs, to generate ideas, to simplify language and instructions, and to use speech-to-text and/or text-to-speech for language translation.

If you suspect that a student has submitted an assignment generated entirely by ai, addressing the issue carefully can ensure open conversations:

• Acknowledge your biases and don't assume the student's intent.
• Come from a place of support rather than words/actions that shame the student.
• Consider how much ai assistance was used to write the assignment.
• If the piece is 100 percent ai, offer zero credit for that assignment and give the student the opportunity to rewrite it.

It's also important to talk to families about ai-generated writing. Define what ai-generated writing is, provide a variety of acceptable uses of ai in the classroom, provide a discipline matrix showing actions for violations of ai use, and emphasize that ai has some great tools to help students with writing, but not in generating complete tasks.

Important considerations for ai in the classroom include:

• ai is here to stay: it is a companion and help, not a substitute for humans
• Renew and review your teaching approach with ai in mind
• Try something new, like shorter periods of writing and/or collaboration, to assess skills.
• Train your students on how to use ai ethically: When is it appropriate to use ai?
• Work to help students gain confidence in their writing.

“ai is going to be there; we need to go back to best practices in teaching,” Miller said. “We need to look at it again. Best practices will help us help our students gain that confidence.”

Laura Ascione is the editorial director of eSchool Media. She graduated from the prestigious Philip Merrill School of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

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