Artificial Intelligence Improves Writing Skills for Brazilian Students - ICTworks

Artificial intelligence has the potential to support teachers in completing time-intensive, subjective tasks, such as grading essays, and to provide individualized feedback to students on their writing.

However, evidence on whether and how AI impacts students’ writing skills remains limited. To fill this gap, researchers evaluated the learning impacts of using AI systems to score and comment on essays written for Brazil’s national post-secondary admission exam.

Research Approach

Researchers evaluated an AI-enabled writing platform called Letrus that provided automated feedback on practice essays for Brazil’s national university entrance exam (ENEM). The study tested two versions – one with only AI feedback, and another with additional feedback from human graders. Over 19,000 high school seniors across 178 public schools in Espírito Santo participated.

The Letrus platform used natural language processing and machine learning to instantly analyze students’ essays and provide feedback on elements like grammar, style, and adherence to the exam scoring rubric. The AI scored essays on a 1,000 point scale and highlighted areas for improvement.

AI Writing Tutoring Results

Both the AI-only and AI+human feedback versions significantly improved students’ ENEM essay scores by about 0.09 standard deviations, closing 9% of the public-private school achievement gap.

Students in both intervention groups wrote more training essays, received more feedback on their essays, and perceived the feedback received as higher-quality. Students increased their essay practice and wrote 1.4 more training essays when using the enhanced edutech (a 29 percent increase relative to the baseline of 4.9 essays) and 1.6 more essays when using the pure edutech (a 32 percent increase) relative to the comparison group.

Surprisingly, the AI-only feedback was just as effective as having additional human grader input. Students practiced writing more essays and received more individualized feedback from teachers when using Letrus.

EduTech Policy Impact

Based on the results, the state of Espírito Santo scaled the AI-only version of Letrus to all public high school seniors to enhance writing instruction cost-effectively. Over 100,000 students have used the platform since 2020. Other Brazilian states are also adopting Letrus, and further research is underway on longer-term impacts like college enrollment.

Cristóbal Cobo’s edited interpretation of the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Learning in Brazil

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