Developing Students’ Academic Writing Skills: Feedback and Revising through an Intelligent Tutoring System at Siirt University

Cuneyt Demir

Authors

Cuneyt Demir Department of English Language Teaching, Faculty of Education, University of Siirt, Turkey

Keywords:

AI-based tools, Teacher feedback, Writing, Higher education

Abstract

This research investigated two types of feedback, AI-based and traditional teacher feedback, to improve students' academic writing skills in higher education. The research was conducted in the Department of English Language Teaching at a university in Türkiye employs comparative analyses, utilizing a pre-test and post-test design to assess improvements in students' surface-level writing skills. Sixty students, divided into two groups, received either AI-based feedback from tools like ChatGPT, Sudowrite, and Grammarly, or traditional teacher feedback on twelve essays. The study also includes a semi-structured questionnaire to gather qualitative data on students' perceptions of AI-based tools. Two tests, the Mann-Whitney U test and the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test, were utilized for the statistical analyses. The findings yielded a statistically significant difference between the AI-based feedback and teacher feedback, which empowered the potential of AI to improve students’ writing skills. The study found statistically significant differences in terms of AI-based tools and traditional teacher feedback applications. Furthermore, it was found that surface-level writing skills such as grammar, punctuation, and spelling can be greatly improved by AI-based feedback; distinctive features of AI tools are delivering concurrent personalized feedback, which is crucial to sustain the improvement. This study also includes some implications for using AI-based tools in school settings to help students develop in academic writing.

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