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I don't really give finals ... I just ask students to reflect on what they've learned. In fact, I don't even give grades anymore.

It might seem counter-intuitive, but I haven't really found that "ungrading" decreases the quality of the reflections, because the quality has always been uneven. At the end of the semester, we often have less time to work on the reflections ... and students are generally unmotivated.

I've found that asking students to write for outside audiences helps, but only a handful produce a reflection worth publishing.

As a result, I decided to develop an app to help automate the feedback process for these assignments. The app is designed to give students specific feedback on how well they have completed their reflection drafts. I stress to my students that this is just another tool to help them reflect on their learning and not an actual "AI detector." The app is only guessing and is right only when it is guessing that students aren't being specific enough.

The reflection assignment requires students to write a personal statement that can be shared on Medium or a professional web page, geared toward an outside audience such as professionals, clients, and future employers. The statement should demonstrate how students have applied specific concepts from the course and cite specific details from their work. 

To help my students, I provide them with guidelines for writing critical reflections.

Reference Course Outcomes. When writing a self-assessment or reflection, think about the values of the organization you are writing for. What are their goals? What do they value in their employees? Referring to course outcomes from the syllabus can help you show that you align with these values.

Be Specific. Don't just make general statements about your accomplishments or skills. Provide specific examples to support your claims. This will make your writing more persuasive and engaging.

Address a Specific Audience. Figure out how what you've learned might transfer outside of the classrom. Why would anyone care about what you learned? What audience would care about what you have learned?

So yes, I am using this final to assess what students have learned, but I'm also helping them articulate their experience to important stakeholders.

There really is nothing special about building an AI app. You are simply automating the prompting process. I used Hubble.Ai ... but there are many others to choose from. There is nothing exspecially complicate about this kind of app. 

So instead of manually pasting everything into ChatGPT myself (or giving students my feedback prompt), apps like Hubble allow you to program with specific prompts.

All students have to do is cut and paste their draft into the entry box and the app gives them feedback. It is more or less like pasting your draft into ChatGPT with a feedback prompt.

➡️ Click here to see the prompt I used.

(Prompt engineering is an iterative process and best works in collaboration. So if you have any ideas on how to improve this, let me know! I'm still not happy with it.)

The app I built gives pretty good feedback to writing that is student-driven. When I test this with some actual student reflections, the feedback is mostly accurate and gives good feedback. For example, if the app detects that a student is not providing enough detail or examples to support their claims, it will suggest that the student provide more specific examples and even give suggestions. 

But if you take my prompt and generate an essay and pop that into the feedback generator, it tends to say the the essay is successful (and is not the case). I added a few tweaks to take this into account, but still haven't found a way to fix the problem outright. To be continued for sure.

In the end, this app doesn't really do anything complicated. It is simply taking over the mundane task of telling students over and over to be more specific. Without this AI, I would just have a Text Expander snippet that I would cut and paste as a comment.

The app is simply taking the labor out of repetitive work ... to make room for more in-depth engagement. But alas, we are at the end of the semester and almost out of time. Perhaps this will improve the reflections at least by a little bit. We'll see. 🤷‍♂️

Ultimately, I believe apps like these have the potential to help students write better reflections and become more aware of their learning, but they won't replace the teacher.

First of all, teachers have to program such apps ... just like they have to create assignments for students. 

Second of all, LLM technology is still only guessing. There is still space for human engagement with writing ... perhaps even more space now that AI can do some of the grunt work.

Go ahead and give the app a try and let me know how it works. I'm sure it still needs improved.

➡️ Click here to try the app.

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