AI Assistance for Discretionary Work: Increasing Feedback Provision in Higher Education

2026-06-01

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of instructors in higher education often omitting beneficial personalized feedback due to excessive workloads. To support teaching assistants in providing such feedback without compromising human oversight, the authors introduce an innovative approach: editable AI-generated feedback drafts offered as optional scaffolds after initial grading. Teaching assistants retain full autonomy to accept, modify, or disregard these drafts, ensuring complete human control over the final output while encouraging engagement with otherwise neglected beneficial tasks. Using a mixed-methods design combining a randomized controlled trial and qualitative interviews, the research demonstrates that AI assistance increases the provision of personalized feedback by 10.8 percentage points and extends feedback length by an average of 39.8 characters, without diminishing student evaluations or increasing time spent per character.

Abstract

AI systems increasingly shape human workflows by generating intermediate artifacts that users can adopt, revise, or ignore. While prior work has shown that AI assistance can improve the efficiency and accuracy of required tasks, less is known about whether it can increase participation in discretionary but beneficial work that users often intend to perform but frequently skip. We study this question in the context of personalized feedback provision in higher education, a pedagogically valuable but often optional practice. We conduct a mixed-methods study combining a randomized field experiment and qualitative interviews in a 300-level machine learning course with n=11 teaching assistants (TAs) and n=88 students. Student submissions were randomly assigned to either (1) a treatment condition where TAs received AI-assisted feedback drafts after grading or (2) a control condition without drafts. TAs remained fully in control and could use, edit, or ignore drafts at their discretion. We find that AI-assisted feedback significantly increases feedback provision (+10.8 percentage points, SE=1.1, p<0.001) and feedback length (+39.8 chars, SE=3.45, p<0.001) without negatively affecting student usefulness ratings or reducing time per character. Qualitative findings suggest that AI-assisted drafts function as editable scaffolds that lower barriers to initiating feedback rather than reducing overall effort. Our findings highlight AI's promise for discretionary but beneficial tasks: increasing work that might otherwise go undone while preserving human control over final outcomes.

Problem

• discretionary work
• feedback provision
• higher education
• AI assistance
• personalized feedback

Innovation

• AI-assisted feedback
• discretionary work
• editable scaffolds
• human-AI collaboration
• higher education