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Gemini gives instant essay feedback
Gemini in every school
Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the third largest district in the United States, gave Gemini to every high school student, more than 100,000 of them, after careful vetting of chatbots and rigorous teacher training on privacy and safety. In the English class, students had been studying free will versus destiny in Oedipus Rex, and each wrote a short argument for one side.
The rubric
The teacher had put her rubric into Gemini: a thesis sentence, strong evidence for it, and a concluding sentence. Some students heard that everything was in place. Others heard that their evidence didn't back up their thesis, or that they had one piece of evidence and needed three. Gemini judged content only and gave no feedback on literary quality or word choice.
The teacher's role
With five classes of 30 kids, grading 150 essays is a heavy load. The teacher still read every one, as she always did. The chatbot's job was to tell students quickly, while still in class, what they were missing, so they could revise before submitting, and she could see what it had told them.
Why does immediate feedback help students learn?
Feedback that arrives while the work is still fresh lets a student fix a misunderstanding before it hardens into a habit. Educational researcher John Hattie's synthesis of more than 800 meta-analyses ranked feedback among the stronger influences on student achievement. The effect depends on the kind of feedback, with specific comments about the task helping more than praise or a bare grade. Hattie published the synthesis in his 2009 book Visible Learning.
Why do rubrics make grading more consistent?
A rubric spells out the criteria for each score, so different graders look for the same things. A 2007 review by Anders Jonsson and Eva Svingby found that rubrics generally help graders agree with each other. They work best when the criteria are specific and the graders have trained on examples. The review appeared in the journal Educational Research Review.
How do chatbots score essays?
A language model reads the rubric and the essay together as one prompt and writes a reply that applies the criteria to the text. This works best for structural checks, such as whether a thesis exists and whether each claim has support, because those can be stated in plain words. Automated essay scoring is older than chatbots. Ellis Page built Project Essay Grade in the 1960s, one of the first programs to score student writing.
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