2023-2025 Compose with AI
(NSF Award #2337969)
The Development of a Digital Platform for Evaluating and Using AI-Generated Content for Academic Purposes
What approaches and strategies inhibit and enhance students’ abilities to use and critically evaluate content generated with AI?
What uses of AI inhibit and enhance students’ abilities to integrate AI-generated content into their writing in ethical ways?
To what extent and in what ways do teachers and students in grades 4-8 find Compose with AI to be useful and usable for integrating AI-generated content into their science-focused writing?
As a recently funded project, the purpose of this project is to develop a web-based platform, called Compose With Artificial Intelligence (AI), aimed at guiding students to evaluate AI-generated content and use factual information to compose common types of science-focused writing (e.g., composing arguments, claims or solutions related to science topics).
Our digital platform, Compose with AI, will guide students to gather and critically evaluate content produced by AI tools such as ChatGPT, guide students on beneficial and ethical uses of content produced by AI, and scaffold students’ use of AI-generated content as a model and resource for composing science-focused texts that make arguments, make claims, and/or provide reasoning. To maximally support a range of students, Compose With AI will include embedded videos to inform and support learners, includes self-regulated learning prompts (Sanders et al., 2019), scaffold computational thinking, be designed with Universal Design for Learning principles, and help students collect relevant information to generate digital compositions.
HOW DOES COMPOSE with AI WORK?
Choosing a Topic
After signing in to the platform the students will see a dashboard showcasing various writing tasks and AI integration options. Each option embedded a video explaining how and why you could use it.
The students pick a topic to start their writing experience.
Start the Project
Students can learn about the topic via a video that can be clicked once a topic has been selected.
Students name their project to start.
Write a Prompt
Once students select their purpose related to writing, they are walked through a structured process for engineering a high-quality prompt related to their specific needs. The R.A.F.T. technique (Role, Audience, Format, Topic) supports them to write a well-founded prompt.
Try your Prompt
Students click the “try it” button to try their prompt in Chat GPT or other AI tools chosen through the teachers dashboard. The students copy the provided answers from the AI tool into the "AI Response" box at the "Compose with AI" website.
Rate your Prompt
After students review the results generated by AI, they are guided to rate their prompt and decide if it generated the information they needed. If they indicate that they were unable to write a prompt that helped them, they are redirected to try a new prompt. Otherwise, they move forward.
Evaluate the AI Response
Students critically evaluate the credibility, usefulness and accuracy of the AI response. Students are given a menu of options and each type of evaluation strategy is explained in an embedded video. Students are required to choose two evaluation strategies and answer related questions about their AI content before the platform advances them to the next step.
Information & Text
Students are guided to select which information from the AI-generated response is useful for their purpose.
They are provided with three boxes where they categorize information from the response as something they can use as it is, something they can use but need to modify, and something they will not use.
Compose your Response
Once this step is complete, the students are directed to compose a response. This screen varies based on which task-type they chose from the dashboard at the beginning. Regardless of task-type, the information that students have collected and categorized throughout the process follows them throughout the platform and culminates here. Students have information about content they want to use or exclude available to them on the left side of the screen as they compose their response. Students are required to provide their sources, including AI, before moving to the final screen.
Summary
The summary on the final screen shows the students all the steps they took and the information they collected throughout the entire platform. It also allows them to save their work as a PDF.
