Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Research in Education
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Teaching Writing Skills – Does AI Function as A Learning Aid or Hinderance?
Dr. Sarah Quintanar
ABSTRACT:
The advancement of AI has brought significant improvements in productivity across nearly every industry, but its rapid development has left policymakers scrambling to define appropriate ethical use. Higher education is no exception, as significant resources at individual institutions and broader government agencies are currently being devoted to studying the appropriateness of AI within the educational sphere (Federal Department of Education 2024, for example). This project utilizes a natural experiment to tease out the impact of individual student AI use on writing improvement over a semester leadership course. The impact of using AI for home assignments is measured by comparing writing outcomes in “controlled” assessments to those in “uncontrolled” writing assessments at different points of time in the semester. A “controlled” assessment occurs when students are prevented from using outside resources for assistance (i.e. they complete the writing in class with lockdown browser enabled). “Uncontrolled” assessments are completed outside of class and students may choose to use AI in completing the assessment. I find strong evidence that students who self-select into using AI see lower rates of improvement in writing metrics as compared to their non-AI counterparts, even when controlling for initial writing skill level. This insight is valuable as it suggests students will not advance writing skills as quickly when relying on AI during the learning process, therefore teachers should discourage using AI at this stage of student learning.
keywords: : artificial intelligence, writing skills, AI in education, AI best practices, Chat GPT, higher education