Artificial intelligence to strengthen high school students’ writing skills

• In Event: Tailored Instruction at Scale: Harnessing A.I. to Close Learning Gaps

Proposal

Over the past decade, more than 10 million state school students in Brazil have taken ENEM, the national exam for high school students. The microdata reveals alarming results, particularly in writing, where zero scores are common. This suggests that approximately 2 million students struggle to articulate clear social proposals. Additionally, over 50% of 15-year-olds in Brazil face difficulties identifying explicit elements in texts, indicating critical gaps in reading skills. Most students cannot distinguish facts from opinions or identify the main theme of a text.

Since 2016, Letrus has addressed this problem through our award-winning and validated writing curriculum program powered by AI. The program is aimed at students in upper elementary and high school. Students accessing the Letrus platform are guided through the writing process. Before writing, they engage in reading and interpretation activities, becoming sensitized to the topic and recording reflections on the platform. Next, the student plans their text, highlights important concepts, and takes notes. Then, they proceed to writing.

Once completed, the text is submitted to our AI, which generates and provides immediate, personalized feedback. Detailed annotations allow the student to deeply understand the nuances of each evaluation criteria and provide detailed information on their strengths, areas for improvement, and actions that can be taken in their next writing assignment. 95% of students who use Letrus state that, based on the feedback, they know exactly how to improve in their next writing task.

While the students write, their teacher receives real-time data on each class's activities and individual students' progress. This information is immediately available, enabling them to intervene where they can offer their perspective on the feedback to the students, with the ability to edit the grades and feedback created by the AI, allowing more autonomy for the educator.

Class- and individual-level data is also available to school and education network administrators through dashboards and reports, revealing a complete and scaled view to make decisions for the school or network. This allows us to address a pain point in our educational system: the lack of data that prevents us from making deep diagnoses and making quality strategic decisions.

Letrus has yielded positive results. In 2019, J-PAL and FGV conducted a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) confirming the program’s effectiveness in improving writing skills for public school students in Espírito Santo, Brazil. The trial involved 12,000 students across 110 schools, with 68 schools serving as a control group. The success of the program led Espírito Santo to rise from sixth to first place in ENEM essay scores between 2020 and 2023. Since 2022, Letrus has been an official partner of the state, with operations now expanding to Goiás, Mato Grosso, and Ceará. To date, Letrus reaches over 300,000 public school students and around 70,000 private school students across more than 1,500 schools nationwide.

The program’s success was recognized in 2020 with the UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa-Al Khalifa Prize, awarded to the best educational technology initiatives globally.

Author

• Luis Junqueira, Letrus