Natural Language Feedback (NLF) is an increasingly popular mechanism for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to human preferences. Despite the diversity of the information it can convey, NLF methods are often hand-designed and arbitrary, with little systematic grounding. At the same time, research in learning sciences has long established several effective feedback models. In this opinion piece, we compile ideas from pedagogy to introduce FELT, a feedback framework for LLMs that outlines various characteristics of the feedback space, and a feedback content taxonomy based on these variables, providing a general mapping of the feedback space. In addition to streamlining NLF designs, FELT also brings out new, unexplored directions for research in NLF. We make our taxonomy available to the community, providing guides and examples for mapping our categorizations to future research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in educational tasks such as providing writing suggestions to students. Despite their potential, LLMs are known to harbor inherent biases which may negatively impact learners. Previous studies have investigated bias in models and data representations separately, neglecting the potential impact of LLM bias on human writing. In this paper, we investigate how bias transfers through an AI writing support pipeline. We conduct a large-scale user study with 231 students writing business case peer reviews in German. Students are divided into five groups with different levels of writing support: one in-classroom group with recommender system feature-based suggestions and four groups recruited from Prolific – a control group with no assistance, two groups with suggestions from fine-tuned GPT-2 and GPT-3 models, and one group with suggestions from pre-trained GPT-3.5. Using GenBit gender bias analysis and Word Embedding Association Tests (WEAT), we evaluate the gender bias at various stages of the pipeline: in reviews written by students, in suggestions generated by the models, and in model embeddings directly. Our results demonstrate that there is no significant difference in gender bias between the resulting peer reviews of groups with and without LLM suggestions. Our research is therefore optimistic about the use of AI writing support in the classroom, showcasing a context where bias in LLMs does not transfer to students’ responses.

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer novel opportunities for educational applications that have the potential to transform traditional learning for students. Despite AI-enhanced applications having the potential to provide personalized learning experiences, more studies are needed on the design of generative AI systems and evidence for using them in real educational settings. In this paper, we design, implement and evaluate \texttt{Reviewriter}, a novel tool to provide students with AI-generated instructions for writing peer reviews in German. Our study identifies three key aspects: a) we provide insights into student needs when writing peer reviews with generative models which we then use to develop a novel system to provide adaptive instructions b) we fine-tune three German language models on a selected corpus of 11,925 student-written peer review texts in German and choose German-GPT2 based on quantitative measures and human evaluation, and c) we evaluate our tool with fourteen students, revealing positive technology acceptance based on quantitative measures. Additionally, the qualitative feedback presents the benefits and limitations of generative AI in peer review writing.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has become increasingly utilized to provide adaptivity in educational applications. However, recent research has highlighted a variety of biases in pre-trained language models. While existing studies investigate bias in different domains, they are limited in addressing fine-grained analysis on educational corpora and text that is not English. In this work, we analyze bias across text and through multiple architectures on a corpus of 9,165 German peer-reviews collected from university students over five years. Notably, our corpus includes labels such as helpfulness, quality, and critical aspect ratings from the peer-review recipient as well as demographic attributes. We conduct a Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) analysis on (1) our collected corpus in connection with the clustered labels, (2) the most common pre-trained German language models (T5, BERT, and GPT-2) and GloVe embeddings, and (3) the language models after fine-tuning on our collected data-set. In contrast to our initial expectations, we found that our collected corpus does not reveal many biases in the co-occurrence analysis or in the GloVe embeddings. However, the pre-trained German language models find substantial conceptual, racial, and gender bias and have significant changes in bias across conceptual and racial axes during fine-tuning on the peer-review data. With our research, we aim to contribute to the fourth UN sustainability goal (quality education) with a novel dataset, an understanding of biases in natural language education data, and the potential harms of not counteracting biases in language models for educational tasks.