Exploring LLM-Generated Feedback for Economics Essays: How Teaching Assistants Evaluate and Envision Its Use

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Lu, Xinyi, Mahesh, Aditya, Shen, Zejia, Dudley, Mitchell, Sano, Larissa, Wang, Xu
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Lu, Xinyi
Mahesh, Aditya
Shen, Zejia
Dudley, Mitchell
Sano, Larissa
Wang, Xu
author_facet Lu, Xinyi
Mahesh, Aditya
Shen, Zejia
Dudley, Mitchell
Sano, Larissa
Wang, Xu
contents This project examines the prospect of using AI-generated feedback as suggestions to expedite and enhance human instructors' feedback provision. In particular, we focus on understanding the teaching assistants' perspectives on the quality of AI-generated feedback and how they may or may not utilize AI feedback in their own workflows. We situate our work in a foundational college Economics class, which has frequent short essay assignments. We developed an LLM-powered feedback engine that generates feedback on students' essays based on grading rubrics used by the teaching assistants (TAs). To ensure that TAs can meaningfully critique and engage with the AI feedback, we had them complete their regular grading jobs. For a randomly selected set of essays that they had graded, we used our feedback engine to generate feedback and displayed the feedback as in-text comments in a Word document. We then performed think-aloud studies with 5 TAs over 20 1-hour sessions to have them evaluate the AI feedback, contrast the AI feedback with their handwritten feedback, and share how they envision using the AI feedback if they were offered as suggestions. The study highlights the importance of providing detailed rubrics for AI to generate high-quality feedback for knowledge-intensive essays. TAs considered that using AI feedback as suggestions during their grading could expedite grading, enhance consistency, and improve overall feedback quality. We discuss the importance of decomposing the feedback generation task into steps and presenting intermediate results, in order for TAs to use the AI feedback.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_15596
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring LLM-Generated Feedback for Economics Essays: How Teaching Assistants Evaluate and Envision Its Use
Lu, Xinyi
Mahesh, Aditya
Shen, Zejia
Dudley, Mitchell
Sano, Larissa
Wang, Xu
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
This project examines the prospect of using AI-generated feedback as suggestions to expedite and enhance human instructors' feedback provision. In particular, we focus on understanding the teaching assistants' perspectives on the quality of AI-generated feedback and how they may or may not utilize AI feedback in their own workflows. We situate our work in a foundational college Economics class, which has frequent short essay assignments. We developed an LLM-powered feedback engine that generates feedback on students' essays based on grading rubrics used by the teaching assistants (TAs). To ensure that TAs can meaningfully critique and engage with the AI feedback, we had them complete their regular grading jobs. For a randomly selected set of essays that they had graded, we used our feedback engine to generate feedback and displayed the feedback as in-text comments in a Word document. We then performed think-aloud studies with 5 TAs over 20 1-hour sessions to have them evaluate the AI feedback, contrast the AI feedback with their handwritten feedback, and share how they envision using the AI feedback if they were offered as suggestions. The study highlights the importance of providing detailed rubrics for AI to generate high-quality feedback for knowledge-intensive essays. TAs considered that using AI feedback as suggestions during their grading could expedite grading, enhance consistency, and improve overall feedback quality. We discuss the importance of decomposing the feedback generation task into steps and presenting intermediate results, in order for TAs to use the AI feedback.
title Exploring LLM-Generated Feedback for Economics Essays: How Teaching Assistants Evaluate and Envision Its Use
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15596