Over the past several years, our faculty have experimented with many different exercises and activities involving AI-assisted writing instruction. You’ll notice that almost all of the suggestions linked from this page end with a recommendation that you ask your students to reflect on, debrief, compare, evaluate, or discuss the AI-generated text—a step crucial to developing students’ critical AI literacy.
In WR 111, a first-semester international student observed that “It was interesting to compare my summary writing to ChatGPT’s. It sounded like a textbook and sounded ‘not natural.’ In some way, I felt like it was not my writing style, and I liked my summary more. But ChatGPT gave me a good idea for some details I could take out of my summary.”
In WR 151, a second-semester student working on a semester-long research project reflected that “The AI experiments have been the most useful part of this assignment for me so far. I previously was afraid to use AI because it seemed like it would be diminishing my intelligence and possibly hindering the product of my writing, but this class has shown me that it can be really helpful. I plan on using it to refine my research question more. So I plan on continuing to search in the library for articles, as well as asking AI for some recommendations of what to search, and also other possible articles.”
These nuanced reflections on AI, on voice, on the writing process, and more are some of the most valuable outcomes of AI-assisted activities. Broadly speaking, instructors may want to keep the following goals in mind when working with AI as they plan assignments and activities:
- Better understanding of the role of AI in writing and research pedagogy;
- Building AI expertise among faculty and informing future AI policies for different assignments, courses, and programs;
- Understanding what students know about AI and how they use AI;
- Developing students’ AI literacy and fostering a critical, ethical disposition toward AI.
