ai essay checker for teachers

ai essay checker for teachers

The Role of AI Essay Checkers in Enhancing Efficiency and Quality of Feedback for Teachers

1. Introduction to AI Essay Checkers

This special issue uses the metaphor of a teaching assistant to present four papers that try to: (1) emulate the feedback process used by an instructor on paper evaluations, (2) view student essays as a learning opportunity for the instructor, and (3) provide feedback to the instructor on the effectiveness of the classroom teaching strategies. We will introduce the four papers by placing them within the context of the scoring problem being addressed, namely the holistic, analytic, and formative scoring problems. The essay feedback generation is not only beneficial to students but also can help educators to evaluate the effectiveness in classroom teaching and potentially offer hints for improvements. It is estimated that of all writing assignments in school, 80% are never read by the authors through to completion. Providing formative feedback in the form of natural language generation on instructional essays is an important way to change students’ attitudes towards writing.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) essay checkers can assist students in perfecting their essays while at the same time making the essay writing process easier. The application of AI to essay evaluation has prompted research on many interesting problems such as automatic essay scoring, essay information extraction, and optimal feedback generation. The development of AI essay checkers necessitates the combination of various AI techniques such as natural language processing, machine learning, intelligent agents, and planning. A typical system consists of a user interface, a parser, an analyzer, an evaluator, a knowledge base, and a feedback generator. The user interacts with the system by providing his or her essay, entering queries, and specifying the evaluation criteria to be used.

2. Benefits of Using AI Essay Checkers for Teachers

Instant scoring and feedback generation: AI essay checkers can provide instant scoring and feedback to students. This means teachers can offload the task of grading essays, enabling them to immediately return quality feedback to their students. The immediate access allows students to right away see how they performed. This immediate access to their performance history can also provide strong formative diagnosis for students and open up opportunities for enhanced knowledge mastery.

There are a growing number of ways in which teachers can benefit from using AI essay checkers. Some of the benefits include reducing time lost to grading papers, providing immediate quality feedback to help students improve, and enhancing the quality of one’s own scoring process. Similar to how AI can enhance efficiency of classroom assessments, it can also enhance efficiency and the quality of feedback provided by teachers. The following are ways AI essay checkers can help with scoring papers and providing feedback.

3. Challenges and Limitations of AI Essay Checkers in Educational Settings

Currently, most AI essay checker developers adopt a supervised learning approach and train their systems on training data which are labeled manually by human teachers or experts. However, the annotation task is typically labor-intensive, time-consuming, and involves costly expenses. As a result, such a commonly practiced approach to building an AI essay checker would have two major limitations. Firstly, it might not be easy to obtain a large amount of annotated training data, which would limit the size of the training data. Small-scale training data could result in poor generalization ability and lead to overfitting problems for the trained AI essay checker. Secondly, since training data are annotated over time, training data would gradually become outdated. Thus, AI essay checkers that are trained on the outdated data might not be able to predict the writing quality of students.

The field of Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) has long aimed to leverage the most advanced technologies in computer science to build a wide range of educational software tools, such as vocabulary tutors, grammar error correction systems, and essay checkers, which help to enrich students’ learning experiences. However, due to the complexities of human language and the limitations of natural language processing (NLP) technology, many educational software tools have practical difficulties and cannot provide satisfactory educational services. For AI essay checkers in particular, they must face the hurdles of reading comprehension and understanding students’ written texts, prompting many people, including many AI essay checker developers themselves, to question the feasibility and validity of their software tools.

3.1 Challenges

4. Best Practices for Integrating AI Essay Checkers into Teaching Practices

Best practices for integrating AI essay checkers into teaching practices Electing an appropriate platform enabling the mass-utilization of AI essay checkers is the first key factor for consideration when integrating AI technologies into teaching practices. Such a requisite is outlined in Inan and Gurron’s (2018) integration guidelines. Equally salient are the teacher’s competence and readiness of incorporation from the guidance necessary to the completion of the incorporated process with seamless effort. Costa and Stobabaugh (2015) and Fulton (2015) advocate the involvement of educators at school levels to guide and curate the selection of suitable computer-based technology tools, with the alignment of tools to the district technology vision, a thorough scope in parents’ inclusion, and preparation for professional development. Amongst other selection criteria, the aspects of user privacy setup, user support, and the presence of channel facilitating teacher-to-teacher interaction have to be analyzed. Due consideration has to be extended to the instructional strategies that reinforce students’ competences across the learning continuum with differentiated support for each pair or group of students with different learning requirements. The varied expectation of student performances based on interest, talents, and limitations has fostered personalized learning strategies trending across schools in the United States (Moltz, 2013; Strayer, 2012). With a different dimension, the pairing/set configuration of feedback policies for the peer-review online facility in a particular AI essay marker platform has to be especially catered and clarified with learners at the stage of group allocation and gathering of teachers’ guiding parameters for the indicated purpose in mind.

Chen et al. (2021) highlight the contrasting opinions about AI scoring: the negativism centering on the deceptiveness, shallowness, and loss of creativity, and the positivism pertaining to the user-experience enhancement for teachers and students, the result objectivity, and the availability of feedback in a timely manner. The authors recognize potential problems arising from over-reliance on AI essay checkers though numerous benefits derived from timely and thoughtful feedback can be reaped. The inclusion of AI essay checkers complementing human ratings and the intervention of teachers to manipulate and control the tasks are recommended as solutions. Inan and Gurron (2018) observed that the inclusion of such interventions catered to the need of differentiation and individualization, which Gallup surveys reported that more than two-thirds of parents have, for their children’s learning paths.

5. Future Developments and Implications for the Use of AI Essay Checkers in Education

Already widely used in language courses, AI essay checkers have demonstrated their efficiency in performing tasks similar to writing correction. Their remarkable ability to simulate the role of a human being has opened a new era for the improvement of writing teaching tools, particularly in massive and high-use language education. Although they were considered to be only part of an evolution toward machines that could completely assume the role of professors and teaching assistants – considered by the literature as intellectual giants – they have already proven their usefulness. Nowadays, while writing activities continue to be considered part of the essential skills that are developed during language training or within general education curricula, the interest of researchers that study the field of automatic essay checkers has been growing, too. Their supported interest is a clear indication of the precise position and application of this new tool in the teaching and learning process. The evolution of AI essay checkers to intelligent services improves the quality of feedback provided to students.

With AI essay checkers or other similar tools in relation to education, the most critical problem is always how to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness, while minimizing the problems or downsides of using these tools. We believe that increased realization depends on stakeholders, having proper standards, and continuous development towards improvement. The kind of realization that includes knowing when non-AI technology is a better choice, understanding why certain feedback must always come from humans, and having appropriate trust and skepticism about what a given system can produce. As new and existing systems improve in alignment with these ideals, and as society becomes more convinced that these ideals and our own aspirations to develop and apply AI-related technology are shared, we believe that AI has great potential to contribute to a broad realization scenario, which could lead to an incredibly exciting future. And a teaching-centric realization is a key to any of these scenarios.