Hypothesis
Higher-quality feedback from generative AI, especially with chain-of-thought prompting, would lead graduate students to make better essay revisions than teacher feedback.
What failed
In a randomised three-group experiment with 70 graduate students, chain-of-thought feedback was rated higher in quality than both zero-shot and teacher feedback, yet it did not produce significantly greater improvement in revised essays; teacher feedback gave comparable gains.
Broken assumption
Better feedback content translates directly into better revisions.
Why
The authors conclude that feedback quality alone is not enough: how students engage with and take up the feedback determines the effect on writing.
From the published paper: Farrokhnia et al. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2026. ↗CC BY