Training students to self-edit their academic essays with Co-Pilot
Nele Cornelissen, Belgium
As teachers in training, our students are eager to enhance their writing skills, yet they often feel frustrated by their perceived lack of progress. In turn, I share their frustration – I find it challenging to provide personalised feedback due to time constraints. These aspiring educators, being part of the digital generation, crave instant, practical feedback to improve not only their academic essays but also their overall writing abilities.
To set my students up for success in the brave new world of generative AI, I dedicated a class to practising and experimenting with Co-Pilot as a personal writing tutor. The objective was twofold: first, to receive meaningful feedback on a specific academic essay and second, to enhance their academic writing skills more broadly. By doing so, they would acquire transferable skills applicable to future writing assignments.
This is what we did:
- We held a group discussion on the students’ current self-editing skills.
- Questions:
- What are your most common mistakes?
- Where are your problem areas?
- What self-editing strategies do you currently use?
- What are the challenges of self-editing?
- We set up a prompt together and generated feedback from Co-Pilot.
- The prompt:
- I am a first-year teacher in training and I am trying to improve my academic writing skills. Act as my language tutor. Analyse the academic essay I have written and please give specific and meaningful feedback in a first-person, supportive voice based on the writing assignment and a number of assessment criteria that I will give you.
- The writing should aim to be at an advanced English level.
Add the task description, the assessment criteria and your essay.
Follow-up task:
Ask Co-Pilot at least one follow-up question, such as:
You say I need to work on my cohesion by using more cohesive devices. Can you give me three examples of a cohesive device and can you indicate where in my academic essay I could use a cohesive device?
- We compared and discussed the AI-generated feedback and edited the essays.
- In pairs: discuss the feedback you have received and identify common strengths and areas for improvement and collaborate on revising your essays based on the feedback received, incorporating suggestions from your peer.
- We did a quick (but valuable!) wrap-up.
- What have we learnt?
- What can Co-Pilot do for us?
- What can it not do?
PS: Interestingly, students were both surprised by the difficulty of prompt engineering and amazed by the autonomy this technology offers. They were also baffled and amused by Co-Pilot confidently stating incorrect information, even when it was blatantly obvious to them that it was wrong.
