The Responsible Development of Automated Student Feedback with Generative AI

Abstract: Providing rich, constructive feedback to students is essential for supporting and enhancing their learning. Recent advancements in Generative AI, particularly with LLMs, present new opportunities to deliver scalable, repeatable, and instant feedback, effectively making abundant a resource that has historically been scarce and costly. From a technical perspective, this approach is now feasible due to breakthroughs in AI and NLP. While the potential educational benefits are compelling, implementing these technologies also introduces a host of ethical considerations that must be thoughtfully addressed. One of the core advantages of AI systems is their ability to automate routine and mundane tasks, potentially freeing up human educators for more nuanced work. However, the ease of automation risks a ``tyranny of the majority'', where the diverse needs of minority or unique learners are overlooked, as they may be harder to systematize and less straightforward to accommodate. Ensuring inclusivity and equity in AI-generated feedback, therefore, becomes a critical aspect of responsible AI implementation in education. The process of developing machine learning models that produce valuable, personalized, and authentic feedback also requires significant input from human domain experts. Decisions around whose expertise is incorporated, how it is captured, and when it is applied have profound implications for the relevance and quality of the resulting feedback. Additionally, the maintenance and continuous refinement of these models are necessary to adapt feedback to evolving contextual, theoretical, and student-related factors. Without ongoing adaptation, feedback risks becoming obsolete or mismatched with the current needs of diverse student populations [...]