How do students redraft their writing?

And how do teachers help them?

Here is an example of one of the most improved pieces of writing in our recent Year 6 redrafting project.

This is the start of the original piece, from March.

Here’s the start of the redrafted piece, completed in May.

Why is the redrafted piece better?

• It’s paragraphed, which helps give it a clearer narrative structure.

• The sentence structure is more accurate and sophisticated. The run-ons have been eliminated and noun appositive phrases added. Compare the second sentence of the original piece with the second and third sentence of the redrafted piece.

One peacefull day while Eliza was sleeping she woke up to a loud bang not knowing what it was she looked out the window the planet was destroyed.

One peaceful morning, while Eliza was sleeping, she was jolted awake by a thunderous bang. Heart pounding, she stumbled to the window - only to find a planet falling apart.

• The vocabulary is improved – eg jolted, thunderous, stumbled, eerie.

What feedback did the student get?

We provided schools with very detailed and personalised feedback reports which featured a mix of AI feedback, teacher feedback and resources designed by us. Here’s a brief summary of what was available - you can read more here.

• Audio feedback: teachers could choose to leave audio comments while judging. If they did, this report turned those audio comments into individual comments for every student.

• Whole-group feedback: This report provides teachers with whole-class, whole-year group and whole-cohort feedback based on summaries of the audio comments.

• Student feedback: this report provides each student with the following: an image of their writing, the audio comment, direct AI feedback on 3 features of writing, a set of 5 multiple-choice questions created by us and allocated to students based on their overall score (3 sets of questions were available in total: one on capitals, one on run-on sentences and one on vocabulary).

• Teacher feedback: similar to the above, but with more detailed direct AI feedback and data on each student’s performance.

How did the teacher use the feedback?

However, these reports mean nothing if students don’t engage with them or understand them, and there is so much detail available that it is possible for them to be used in very different ways. We asked the class teacher, Cynthy Tang of Rose Hill Primary, how she managed the feedback. First, she told us which of the above reports she found most useful.

The two reports I really valued were the student report and the teacher report. The student report was individualised and gave specific feedback on the writing skill, how they performed and what they could improve on. Providing three key areas gave a focus to their editing and improving.

The teacher report was really useful to support teacher assessments. A lot of the writing features are similar criteria to our school writing assessment objectives sheets, so this really supported teacher workload. Again the 'suggestions for improvement' was so individualised. This would have taken a lot of time to feedback per pupil.

Then, she explained how she delivered the feedback in class.

I began by giving pupils the AI student reports and asking them to look at the three areas (capital letters, vocab and run on sentences) they were asked to focus on and to attempt the multiple-choice questions. I went through all three areas together with the whole class and marked them together as I felt that was still beneficial.

I took one pupil’s student report and read out the three improvement/feedback points on the table given by AI Chloe. I asked the class to use talk-partners to discuss what strategies they could use to improve their writing and came up with a class list: ambitious vocab, varied sentence structures, use of our five senses, show-not-tell, punctuation etc.

Alongside this, I had put pupil’s writing into ChatGPT and asked it to provide five new targets for each pupil to focus on. Some of this was spelling, punctuation, comma splices and run on sentences. With ChatGPT, it was able to make further adaptations for lower ability chn by offering specific examples of what they wrote and provide an example of an improved sentence.

I then gave out copies of their original APWs and asked pupils to edit their work with green pen before writing up on APW coded sheets.

This feels like a great way of delivering the feedback, and it’s also a reminder that even though AI is capable of providing incredibly useful and detailed feedback, you still need a human teacher to make it intelligible and understandable for students.