Examining AI Use in Reading and Writing

In this assignment, students responded to a reading about AI while documenting how they used—or chose not to use—AI throughout their reading and writing process. They recorded their prompts and AI outputs, submitted their final response, and reflected on how AI influenced their thinking, writing, and learning.

Author: Michael Larkin, Senior Continuing Lecturer in College Writing Programs

Course Number & Title: College Writing R1A (Accelerated Reading and Composition) & College Writing R4B (Reading, Composition, and Research)

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Details
Assignment Title
 		Examining AI Use in Reading and Writing
Delivery FormatIn-person
Learning Objectives
  • To think critically about AI’s effects on reading, writing, thinking, and learning.
  • To actively begin to articulate some of their own guiding principles for use (or non-use) of AI for these purposes.
  • To prompt their thinking and discussion of the AI use policy for the course, including how (and if) they would use AI tools in the course and whether the course AI use policy could do with some revision.
Brief Summary of AssignmentStudents selected one of three short readings (about AI and its effects on writing, reading, and/or learning) and wrote up a short response to the selected author’s argument about AI. In doing so, students could choose to use AI as much or as little as they chose and then I asked them to write about why they made that choice.
Guardrails or disclosure expectations shared with studentsThe course policy on AI use lays out the ground rules, which I indicated they could push if not entirely dispense with in this assignment by, for instance, letting them use AI for composing if it served their purposes for learning/experimenting with AI.
Impact & FeedbackI will definitely use some version of this assignment again. In this age of AI use, I would view some active acknowledgement, discussion, and experimentation with AI tools to be essential for inviting transparency between teacher and student about the way AI can be acceptably used and ways in which it absolutely should not be. (i.e. above and beyond teacher-set course policies and expectations.) The students appreciated it.
Step-by-Step InstructionsWe had brief initial discussions of AI use–their thoughts on it, what they would/wouldn’t want AI to do--before they completed this assignment. I also asked them to read/skim the three articles on the class before their written responses were due. (i.e. these discussions took place during the first two classes of the semester).

Then, during week 2, they completed the full writing assignment about their selected article as indicated on the detailed assignment sheet. We then discussed their experiences completing the assignment during that day’s class (in this case, it was the third class of the semester.)
Grading or AssessmentEssentially the students earned the full points if they completed the assignment adequately. (The assignment was low-stakes and counted as only a small percentage of the overall course grade.)
Assignment DetailsLarkin_Examining AI Use in Reading and Writing Assignment Sheet R1A and R4B
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