Through a $10 million federal grant, UCI’s School of Education is launching the National Center for Writing Research to Improve Teaching Effectiveness with Generative AI, known as the WRITE AI Center for short.
Over the next five years, the center will develop and evaluate evidence-based approaches to using AI in writing instruction, while creating resources and conducting research to help colleges make informed decisions about how to adopt AI in ways that strengthen classroom writing instruction and learning.
The WRITE AI Center will conduct two major research studies, said Mark Warschauer, an education professor who serves as the center’s principal investigator and director. Warschauer is also the director of UCI’s Digital Learning Lab.
The first will be a nationwide survey and case study to better understand what AI tools people are already using. The intent is to create databases and other resources for educators and students so they can see what AI tools are being used and to what extent.
The second focus will be an implementation and evaluation study using PapyrusAI, a software platform developed by UCI to provide students with personalized writing support.
Unlike general-purpose AI chatbots like ChatGPT, the university said, PapyrusAI is designed specifically for education since it guides students through planning, revising and strengthening their work while helping instructors provide more personalized support.
UCI researchers have conducted several case studies of the tool to see how teachers and students use it and what uses “seem to be productive” for improving students’ writing, Warschauer said.
“But what we haven’t done, and what nobody has done, is a randomized controlled trial: What happens if you take 50 instructors who are interested in being part of this, and you randomly assign them?” he said. “These 25, you teach this AI-infused curriculum and platform, and these other 25, you’re going to do business as usual.”
“In both of these classes — what we call the treatment classes and the control classes — we (will) look at: Do students improve in their writing without AI? Do they improve in their writing confidence or self-efficacy? Do they improve in their AI literacy? The students that do this … are they more likely to persist into the next class, get good grades and graduate community college?”
This control trial, which will fully kick off in year three of the five-year course of work, will investigate how AI vs. non-AI writing instruction affects more than 1,000 community college students’ learning, across 60 classes in three different states, Warschauer said.
AI impact on education was clear from the start
Funding for the center comes from a grant through the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. UCI’s proposal for the WRITE AI Center was the sole award through IES’ national competition.
While the center’s five-year program of work technically began earlier this month, its first steps actually began almost two years ago, Warschauer said, when UCI proposed this project in its pitch for the federal grant.
For its grant, IES called for any proposals that would look to “improve post-secondary education with generative AI,” said Warschauer, who has spent decades researching digital technologies and writing.
“We decided to focus on writing because we thought that’s a really important issue that we had a lot of expertise and work on,” Warschauer said.
Usually, researchers like Warschauer wait about six months for their proposals to be reviewed when applying for a federal grant, he said.
But because of recent changes within the Department of Education and its research arm that offered this grant — from attempting to move some of IES’ programs and shutting down others — the review period for UCI’s proposal lasted more than a year, Warschauer said.
“Literally about three weeks ago or so, we heard that it was going to be funded,” he said.
Warschauer and Tamara Tate, the co-principal investigator and associate director of the WRITE AI Center, have since been working to bring more personnel on board and check back in with community colleges that originally agreed to be part of the trial to see if they are still willing to participate. The center has about a dozen personnel, but the hope is to have 15-20 at full strength.
While the center’s work is in its infancy, Warschauer said researchers have already known generative AI would dramatically shake up writing and writing instruction as soon as the technology was publicly available. And since the genie can’t be put back in the bottle, researchers and educators will have to find the best way to integrate it into learning environments, Warschauer said.
“I did my dissertation on online learning and writing in the mid 1990s. And as soon as generative AI came out publicly with ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022, both of us realized that this was dramatically shaking up the future of writing and writing instruction,” Warschauer said, referring to Tate.
“Our general feeling is that it’s not going away. It has a lot of affordances, and it also has a lot of threats, but we can’t put our head in the ground,” he said.
“We have to figure out the best way to integrate it so that students can learn to use AI in ways that are effective for their own learning and effective for their futures.”
‘The role of education in an information society’
The focus is on community colleges because they “are such an engine of social and educational mobility in this country,” Warschauer said, since oftentimes the writing courses are the “main gatekeepers” to future success in these schools.
“The goal is for them to write, without AI, better, as well as with AI,” Tate said. “Our ultimate test will be: have they learned to be better writers even without the AI?”
The Write AI Center will bring together a national partnership that includes the nonprofit education and policy research organization MDRC; the California Community Colleges’ Digital Center for Innovation, Transformation and Equity and three California community colleges; the Virginia Community College System; and Houston City College, UCI said in a news release.
Ultimately, the university said, the WRITE AI Center will focus on one of the most urgent questions facing higher education: “How can AI improve student learning while ensuring students continue to develop the writing, critical thinking and communication skills essential for success?”
But for the WRITE AI Center’s two principal investigators, this endeavor is much more personal than just one question.
“I love writing; it’s a core part of who I am,” said Tate. “I think that this is going to give us an opportunity to really look and help teachers look and explain to students what part of writing is really important. How it essentially helps us to think bigger and better thoughts, to communicate, to be creative, and I want to make sure that we preserve that.
“I want students to pause before they hit that button that says, ‘Do you want AI to write this for you?’ And I want them to know what to think about when they make that decision,” she said.
For Warschauer, the WRITE AI Center will be the culmination of three decades of research into digital learning methods.
He learned early on, he said, that the most important question wasn’t: What is the role of computers and the internet in classrooms?
Instead, it is: What is the role of education in an information society?
“I think the same thing is happening here,” Warschauer said.
“I know there’s a lot of trepidation about AI, and it can be threatening in certain ways. But it’s an incredibly exciting, psychological development that can help make all of our lives, over time, much richer and better if we figure out how to work with it well,” he said.
“Helping higher education — and beyond higher education, K-12 education — figure out the right approaches to help students learn how to leverage these tools rather than avoid them, or be punished for them, or use them in the wrong ways, that’s a tremendously exciting thing to me.”