Wouldn’t it be great if every teacher had a personal teaching assistant to help with time-consuming tasks, like evaluating student writing and providing timely feedback? While this used to be merely a dream, a new digital tool called EnlightenAI is making this a reality.
What Is EnlightenAI?
EnlightenAI is a personalized AI assistant for grading, feedback, and data-driven instruction. Teachers create the assignments and rubrics, and then train the AI on how to grade student work. Because the teacher trains the AI, the outputs that students receive reflect the type of comments and scoring their teacher would traditionally provide.
How does EnlightenAI Work?
To begin the process, teachers design a writing assignment and grading rubric. If they wish, they can have AI assist in brainstorming ideas and drafts. These materials are then uploaded into EnlightenAI.
From there, the writing task is assigned to students in classes that the teacher has created. To assist in this process, EnlightenAI has integrated some of the most popular tools into its system, including compatibility with Google Classroom, Google Docs, Google Sheets, PDFs, Canvas, and Illuminate.
Once students have received, completed, and submitted their work, the teacher trains the AI on how to grade the student work. This is the part that’s really unique and impactful. The teacher, the human in the equation, stays in control by providing the training that allows the AI to accurately assess the student work.
The process is similar to how teachers would prepare a human TA. They train the AI on how to grade the assignments by providing examples and overseeing the scoring of the first few submissions. These samples serve as models from which the AI can learn.
With EnlightenAI, it takes about five teacher-graded samples to train the AI. Once it has been trained, the AI will score the rest of the student submissions and provide written comments as structured by the teacher.
When all submissions have been graded, the teacher can—and should—review the AI-generated grades and comments before passing them along to the students. This may include adjusting the points given on the rubric scale or changing the personalized comments. If teachers agree with the AI or like the comments, they can keep them. Throughout this process, the AI learns the teacher’s preferences.
Is the Feedback and Scoring Accurate?
You might be wondering, “Can the AI really grade as effectively and accurately as I can?”
According to a study published in Educational Psychology, the answer is yes, for the most part.
The study, How does artificial intelligence compare to human feedback? A meta-analysis of performance, feedback perception, and learning dispositions, drew on 41 studies of 4,813 students, and the findings reveal no statistically significant difference in learning performance between students who received AI-generated feedback and those who received human-provided feedback. In other words, in terms of how students perceived that feedback and how it impacted their performance, there was virtually no difference.
The authors are clear in stating that these results don’t mean that the teacher can be replaced. On the contrary, they find that the human teacher is still much better at providing empathy to the students and understanding each student’s unique experiences and circumstances. Both of these are invaluable in the classroom. Beyond that, it’s also important that the human teacher is present to train the AI in how to score the work.
In this light, the authors of the study recommend a hybrid approach in leveraging the efficiencies of AI but also the personal touch of the teacher.
This is precisely the approach taken by EnlightenAI. The teacher stays in the loop during all phases, and the AI helps to speed up the grading and feedback process.
What Other Benefits Might a Teacher Leverage?
If a teacher has multiple sections of the same class, they only need to train the AI once and then apply that training to the other sections as well. They can also reuse this finished rubric in the future without needing to provide additional training. This is a step that will likely save hours of work. It is important to remember that the teacher is still the ultimate classroom expert, and they can and should go through those results to confirm that the feedback is accurate, especially if it’s a summative assessment. If it’s formative, the AI can be asked to take on a little heavier lift.
In addition to receiving individual feedback, the teacher will get a performance summary for the whole class, letting them know the average scores as well as trends that the AI is seeing. For instance, the AI summary might report that students are excelling at using textual evidence and examples to support their reasoning, but stylistically, they struggle with transitions and coherence. This is valuable data and can help the teacher design the next lesson. There’s even built-in AI support for this as well.
Because the rubric assignments and training can be shared with other teachers and sections, EnlightenAI can be used as a common assessment tool that pushes out the same assessment from a central location to multiple classrooms. This might be done by central office staff, a professional learning community (PLC) chairperson, or someone in building leadership. Through this approach, teachers can efficiently assign a common writing task to all students, and the work is scored by a common rubric shaped by the same training data, ensuring that all student work is graded similarly and fairly. These results are then aggregated and able to be used for analysis and data-informed decision-making.
The EnlightenAI team has conducted internal tests to ensure the accuracy of this approach. They’ve taken human-graded writing and then had the AI grade the same submissions and compared the results. EnlightenAI shares that the differences between human and AI grades have been very minimal. In fact, in one demonstration done during a live webinar, the results aligned 100%; the human and the AI rubric scores were identical. Gautam Thapar, the founder of EnlightenAI, suggests that students revise their writing based on the assessment and feedback they’ve received. As they change their writing and resubmit it, the scores change in real time. This means that students get immediate feedback regarding the effectiveness of their revisions. He says that this approach has been highly motivating for students.
In terms of pricing, EnlightenAI is currently free to use. If districts want to set up Clever integration, there is a fee for that. There will eventually be a paid tier of EnlightenAI, but the founder has pledged that there will always be a robust free plan available to teachers.
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Systems
- Rigorous Academic Preparedness
- Student Agency
- Insist on Rigor
- Break Down Barriers
- Align the Work
- Collective Educator Agency
Extend Your Learning
- EnlightenAI (official website)
- How does artificial intelligence compare to human feedback? A meta-analysis of performance, feedback perception, and learning dispositions (Rogers Kaliisa, Kamila Misiejuk, Sonsoles López-Pernas, and Mohammed Saqr in Educational Psychology via Taylor & Francis Group)
- EnlightenAI – Your New T.A. for Grading and Feedback (Eric Curts via YouTube)