Using constrained generative AI in the statistics writing classroom

Abstract

Through think-aloud interviews and survey data from upper-level statistics students, this session introduces a new student-facing software called Write & Audit: AI Scribe. The tool provides individual feedback on writing in the form of visualizations, and it includes functions which use generative AI (GPT-4) to help students at different points in their writing process. For example, a student can type notes in the text editor that are not grammatical—bullet points, sentence fragments—then, with one click, the student can transform those notes into complete sentences. Write & Audit: AI Scribe represents a potential approach for delivering live formative writing feedback to students at scale. In this session, I will describe the tool and its theoretical commitments, present the results of hand-coded think-aloud interviews with statistics students at Carnegie Mellon, and allow audience participants to interact with the tool themselves.