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

arXiv:2606.03095v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI assistance can increase the efficiency and accuracy of human work, but can it also encourage people to undertake valuable tasks they might otherwise skip? Here, we investigate whether AI assistance can improve participation in discretionary but beneficial work 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 an upper-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. We find that AI-assisted feedback significantly increases feedback provision (+10.8 percentage points, SE=1.1, p