ERIC Number: EJ1432265
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024
Pages: 13
Abstractor: As Provided
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EISSN: EISSN-2469-9896
Available Date: N/A
Exploring Generative AI Assisted Feedback Writing for Students' Written Responses to a Physics Conceptual Question with Prompt Engineering and Few-Shot Learning
Physical Review Physics Education Research, v20 n1 Article 010152 2024
Instructor's feedback plays a critical role in students' development of conceptual understanding and reasoning skills. However, grading student written responses and providing personalized feedback can take a substantial amount of time, especially in large enrollment courses. In this study, we explore using GPT-3.5 to write feedback on students' written responses to conceptual questions with prompt engineering and few-shot learning techniques. In stage I, we used a small portion (n=2?0) of the student responses on one conceptual question to iteratively train GPT to generate feedback. Four of the responses paired with human-written feedback were included in the prompt as examples for GPT. We tasked GPT to generate feedback for another 16 responses and refined the prompt through several iterations. In stage II, we gave four student researchers (one graduate and three undergraduate researchers) the 16 responses as well as two versions of feedback, one written by the authors and the other by GPT. Students were asked to rate the correctness and usefulness of each feedback and to indicate which one was generated by GPT. The results showed that students tended to rate the feedback by human and GPT equally on correctness, but they all rated the feedback by GPT as more useful. Additionally, the success rates of identifying GPT's feedback were low, ranging from 0.1 to 0.6. In stage III, we tasked GPT to generate feedback for the rest of the students' responses (n=6?5). The feedback messages were rated by four instructors based on the extent of modification needed if they were to give the feedback to students. All four instructors rated approximately 70% (ranging from 68% to 78%) of the feedback statements needing only minor or no modification. This study demonstrated the feasibility of using generative artificial intelligence (AI) as an assistant to generate feedback for student written responses with only a relatively small number of examples in the prompt. An AI assistant can be one of the solutions to substantially reduce time spent on grading student written responses.
Descriptors: Physics, Science Instruction, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Software, Feedback (Response), Teacher Student Relationship, Cues, Graduate Students, Undergraduate Students, Student Research, Scientific Concepts, Student Attitudes, Instructional Effectiveness, Computational Linguistics, Introductory Courses
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
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Language: English
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