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We have collated a list of ideas which can be used within formative and summative assessments to support students with using AI effectively to enhance their learning. As stated in the guidance and policies section (web), the choice on how and when to use AI is left directly with staff to decide within their own area and subject discipline. This should be done in cross-collaboration with the wider team to ensure consistency and support.

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• Writing support
• Ideation (formative)
• Analysis

The section below focuses on implementation for using AI to guide with writing support.

This simple approach helps students structure their assessment by asking AI to help create an essay structure based on the information that it is given. This is a simple way of asking AI to support students who need help with organisation when developing written work. Whilst this can be used, students must be aware of some of the limitations in place (i.e. the AI must not write paragraphs for them, but simply give an outline of how they can structure writing).

Students can use AI as a writing prompt to help them find clarity in their ideas. By using AI they will be able to ask it questions, gather resources and use it to help kickstart their writing. Although, as with any use of AI, generated information needs to be checked for accuracy.

AI can be used as a critical friend to help support and develop their writing styles. The AI can be asked to give examples of styles of writing, or reports which can help clarify what elements need to be included within the student’s work. It can also give advice and direction on how to achieve this style of writing or approach. Students should be aware that this approach is not designed to write content for them but simply give them ideas and structure towards that style of writing.

This section will help you look at using using AI activities based around analysis and up levelling of information.

When looking at a wide variety of content, it can be useful to summarise content in order to gain a wider understanding of its meaning, which they can then apply to their own context.

Critical thinking skills are vital to ensure that students can analyse and expand upon content. By summarising content, students are able to then write critical thinking pieces based on the key points that have been provided. This also gives them wider opportunities to conduct their own research and compare and contrast this evidence to create and evaluate new ideas and concepts.

Get the students to generate text from an AI tool and then use this is as a basis to analyse, dissect and rewrite using wider academic sources and paraphrasing of information. This can be used as a formative exercise to help students understand how to create academic writing. However, it needs to be clarified that this should not be attempted for summative tasks.

This approach takes AI and makes it a critical friend by asking it to provide feedback on a wide variety of topics and outputs. Through the discussion, AI will be able to support students with practicing key tasks.

Although students need to be careful with uploading sensitive data when used with open data sources, AI can be used to analyse, identify patterns, and feedback key points and ideas to support students with analysing and decrypting varied data sets. This information can then be used to inform their understanding and assertions within the wider piece of work (i.e. essay/dissertation). This approach should only be used if data analysis isn’t being evaluated by learning objectives.

Depending on the approach you take, students can use AI to create content or multimedia as a demonstration of certain approaches, key ideas etc. We would recommend, if taking this approach, that students instead use this as a starting point in terms of analysis and critical reflection upon the work and how they would use or apply that element within their work. This approach is useful if the content being created isn’t being evaluated by learning objectives.