Dr. Maurice Fürstenberg

Maurice Fürstenberg is academic lecturer in German linguistics at the Faculty of Language and Literatures at LMU Munich. He is also part of the interdisciplinary postdoctoral research group TEIFUN, based at the Universities of Tübingen and Stuttgart and PH Ludwigsburg. The group investigates technology-supported innovations in subject-specific teaching settings for 21st century education and AI. Since 2022, his research has focused on the use of artificial intelligence in German language teaching. Within this subject area, he has recently studied questions concerning the quality of AI-generated feedback on texts written by pupils. During his time at CAS, he will focus on this area by conducting an empirical study.

Project at CAS:

The fact that an entity other than humans can produce natural-sounding language is a unique event in human history that bears far-reaching societal challenges and has an extremely relevant impact on the education sector. It is important to ascertain whether society, and the education system in particular, can benefit from AI-based systems, and whether pupils should learn to write with or without these tools. One common application in the education system, for which many private companies already sell supposed solutions, is using AI systems to provide feedback. The immediacy and high scalability of AI-generated feedback are strong arguments for this use, and thus also effective sales arguments. Pupils can receive immediate feedback from an AI as often as they like, and, in a school context, it does not give them marks, making it easier for pupils to ask for feedback. Teachers in turn hope that AI systems will reduce their enormous workload of marking texts and providing feedback. Although such systems are already widely used, numerous questions remain unanswered.

During his time at CAS, Maurice Fürstenberg plans to conduct a study to investigate how helpful AI-generated feedback on student texts is and its influence on the writing process when students can obtain feedback as often as they like, even during the writing process.