When ChatGPT first landed, this seemed particularly bad news for people, like myself, who are based in a discipline that is very writing-intensive and where we pride ourselves in teaching students how to write clearly and critically. As everyone was scrambling to grasp what this meant for education and few policies or advice were available, my initial reaction was to bury my head in the sand.
I decided that I needed to change my approach
However, after one year of teaching with AI constantly looming in the background and feeling a sense of powerlessness that came from the idea that we would be unable to mandate that students not use generative AI while we would also not be able to detect it, I decided that I needed to change my approach. So I started to think about how I could use AI to help students develop their essay writing skills in English literature units.
Using AI for a discipline-specific task
After attending a Cogniti workshop, where the facilitator asked, ‘if you could create a double of yourself, what would you ask it to do?,’ I created a Cogniti AI agent that would replicate the work I often do as a unit coordinator and marker: providing feedback on essay topics to my students. The basic prompt for the agent was written during just 10 minutes during the Cogniti session and it was then refined based on playing around with the agent, and feedback from colleagues and tutors. My prompt instructed Cogniti to tell students if their research question was too broad or too narrow, as this was a common issue when I had done and marked this assignment before.
I also wanted AI to be included in a meaningful way in an assessment and to encourage critical reflection linked to a discipline-specific task
However, I didn’t just want to make my life easier by receiving fewer emails about students’ essay topics but I also wanted AI to be included in a meaningful way in an assessment and to encourage critical reflection linked to a discipline-specific task. This is why I decided to embed the Cogniti agent into an existing task in my third-year English literature unit: an essay plan and annotated bibliography. Students were asked to use Cogniti to help refine their essay question, to identify keywords that they could use to find relevant sources, and to think about a theoretical framework for their essay.
I transformed the assignment into a Canvas quiz to make it clear to the students where they were asked to use information from Cogniti and where they should provide their own answers. For every prompt that students generated with Cogniti, they were also asked to refine it, for example their research essay question, their keywords, and the summaries of key sources that Cogniti provided.
In a critical reflection at the end of their assignment, students were asked to consider how useful Cogniti was for refining their question and helping them in the research process. When discussing the assignment in my lectures, I mentioned that students did not need to say that Cogniti worked but they did need to give me specific examples explaining the usefulness (or uselessness) of Cogniti. I also emphasised that this assignment would help them develop a critical language to talk about AI that will be important for their future careers where they will need to have a clear approach to and explanation for how they use AI.
Challenges and next steps
Overall, students seemed happy to use Cogniti and some found it very useful in the essay planning and research process. One student asked if the agent would be available after the conclusion of the unit and in their critical reflection for the assignment, one student wrote that they were “surprised by how useful [they] found Cogniti” as it “was instantly able to turn my rather convoluted initial statement (…) into the first draft of my research question.”
However, one of the key shortcomings of my agent was that it was not a very good tool to help students summarise sources, as I had not given it information to draw on as it would have been impossible to predict which sources students might use for their essay. For future iterations of this agent, I will use Cogniti to help students refine their essay question and define their theoretical framework but I will direct them to the Library’s Primo Research Assistant to find a list of relevant sources and a brief summary for each source.
To finish with the words of one of my students:
I’m glad this subject doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to AI, and actually integrates it in a practical way.
I will continue thinking about how AI can be integrated in practical ways into learning and assessment practices in English and to encourage a critical and discipline-specific use of AI tools that supports student learning.
