An Antidote to Plagiarism: New App Uses AI to Help Students Think Critically

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As schools nationwide remain on high alert for AI-assisted cheating, we should all remember one thing, says researcher Elliott Hedman: Deep down, most students love to learn.

The problem, he argues, is that school’s feedback system is broken. Grading things like writing assignments is such a time-consuming, arduous task for teachers — especially those who want to offer constructive criticism — that students often don’t get the attention they need. 

“It needs to be instantaneous,” Hedman said. “You need to have that feedback now, not three weeks later.”

A Colorado-based researcher who studies how users interface with technology, Hedman said the same technology that powers plagiarism enablers like ChatGPT now has the potential to make thinking and writing come alive. He has proposed a solution that uses AI to offer immediate suggestions for students as they write.

A struggling reader wants to critically think about a text they barely understand. Our brains are wired to give us a dopamine hit.

Eliott Hedman, researcher

Working with a small group of teachers, he has developed a free tool called Level Up that attaches to students’ Google Docs accounts. As they develop a piece of writing, students can simply flip a switch and ask the app to help organize their thoughts, assist with marshaling evidence, fix grammar and hone a thesis statement.

It’s one of several promising developments emerging as designers like Hedman push to flip a bleak script around AI and its negative effects on student motivation. Instead of banning AI or turning a blind eye to students as they outsource writing and critical thinking, he and others say, we should be using it to help students improve and learn more.

When it comes to writing in particular, teachers struggle with how to help students develop skills, Hedman said. Most often, students get good grades for simply turning in a serviceable piece of prose, with little regard for how they developed the ideas. And teachers often have little time to help them through this process. Pressed for time and bored — or even mystified — by assignments, students naturally turn to AI to produce a satisfactory product. 

In order to refocus on the writing process, Hedman invoked the well-known Apple Computer tagline, saying, “We have to think pedagogically different.”

‘Less like red ink’

As its name suggests, Level Up encourages students by lightly gamifying their skill development, rewarding them with a new “level” of challenge each time they improve their writing. Its main distinction lies in offering something students seldom get in school: instant questions and suggestions that respond to their writing in real time. Instead of focusing on the prize at the end — a completed paper — the tool tackles granular tasks such as shortening too-long sentences, clarifying unclear arguments and strengthening passages that employ the passive voice. 

Hedman likens it to Grammarly — only without the quick, ready-made answers. Instead of allowing users to simply right-click on underlined words or passages to instantly correct them, as the popular app and similar ones do, Level Up challenges students to improve their writing at the sentence level.

Students can ask for several types of feedback: help with an introduction, an argument, a paper’s overall tone, its grammar, or the way it uses evidence to make a point. The opportunity to choose what to work on, Hedman said, makes the feedback feel “less like red ink, less accusatory” to students. And getting immediate feedback that’s not tied to a grade invites them to write more experimentally. 

Developed over the course of several months while Hedman tutored students at a local Girls and Boys Club, Level Up emerged as he pondered the many dilemmas that pop up as digital technologies burrow deeper into children’s lives. “You can’t get students to read anymore,” he said. “You can’t get students to write.” To make matters worse, tools like ChatGPT allow students to “push a single button and it’s going to write.” That allows them to outsource critical thinking at a time when it’s more important than ever.

While improving their writing is key to helping students, he said, it’s not his ultimate objective: “My goal was to understand what they cared about and what they needed” to learn better and enjoy learning more broadly. 

Hedman previously worked with elementary and middle schools to develop a free app called Wonder Stories that helps struggling readers learn to think critically about stories. The app offers short mystery and adventure stories and invites users to shape the narrative. 

“What I discovered was, first off, students love critical thinking,” he said. “A struggling reader wants to critically think about a text they barely understand. Our brains are wired to give us a dopamine hit. We really like solving problems or getting feedback or solving the mystery. This is human nature. We like to be challenged, and we like to kind of get over that hump and solve the problem.”

Getting past ‘AI abstinence’

Level Up grew out of four years of research using “emotion sensors” he developed while earning a PhD at MIT’s renowned Media Lab. He has since worked at several education providers, from the school design startup IDEO, Lego and the children’s digital game developer Toca Boca to McGraw Hill.

He helped develop early i-Ready diagnostic tests for Curriculum Associates and noticed that for a lot of students, school “was one of the most broken emotional experiences I’ve ever seen.” Most notably, it features a problematic mismatch between students’ willingness to learn and schools’ inability to engage them. As a result, they lose focus and eventually stop caring about school.

Handing them the keys to powerful AI tools won’t help them develop learning habits, he said, but neither will depriving them of these, as many schools now do. He calls the practice “AI abstinence” and said his recent survey of about 200 students shows that many — especially high schoolers — are using AI heavily to sound smarter in writing and hit required word counts. Students now routinely let AI write their essays, he said, then go back and paraphrase sentences to make them sound more natural. 

“They talk about this process casually, like running spell check,” he wrote recently, noting that many students have already figured out that AI detection tools fail when humans simply paraphrase their borrowed text. “It’s human writing, technically, but not human thought,” he said.

One student told him, “Pretty much all of my friends use AI every time,” while another likened it to alcoholism, telling Hedman, “I don’t drink, but it’s like testing alcohol. You try it once, then the next day you want more. Soon, it’s just how you do things.”

College writing coach and columnist John Warner, who has written several books on student writing, acknowledged the difficulties of getting students to write, but said that perhaps a better way would be to focus less on their arguments and grammar and more on their ability to explore different kinds of writing, at least earlier in their education.

“We can let young students just ‘do stuff’ with writing and not worry too much about, ‘Is there a thesis?’ They just need to be writing — and they just need to be experiencing writing and reading and expressing themselves, looking at the world, seeing what they think, seeing what they feel, seeing what they mean.”

I'm a skeptic about 'real time feedback.’ Sometimes the struggle is the point.

John Warner, college writing coach

Warner said we should actually think differently about whether teachers are grading writing effectively. “I’m a skeptic about ‘real time feedback,’” he said, noting that teachers can help students on occasion by waiting until they ask for help. “Sometimes the struggle is the point.” 

Students — especially young students — need encouragement, not instructions. “The feedback would be, ‘Great. Do it again.’ The idea that we need to inculcate these very specific skills as early as possible, I don’t think there’s any evidence for it.”

While banning AI altogether might seem logical, Hedman said, it’s ridiculous in a world saturated with AI. Instead, he proposes that students need teachers to help them understand the endeavor. 

“If we put guardrails and [say], ‘You actually have to reflect on your paper — and you will get graded on this reflection,’ it changes the students’ mindset from ‘My job is to turn in a nice paper’ to ‘My job is to reflect and think about my paper and make edits.’”

The distinction might seem small, he said. “But every student I interviewed said they would prefer it that way.” 

Receiving a grade on the work that goes into an improved essay, rather than simply the end product, is much more motivating, he said. It has actually spawned an emerging field called labor-based grading that is only growing as AI tools improve.

“You put energy and time and reflection into this paper and you should have that be in your grade, not just that you turned in a nice-looking paper” Hedman said. “Because anyone can turn in a nice looking paper with ChatGPT now. But can people put in work and reflect and improve their papers? That’s a different skill.”

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