Democratizing Writing Support with AI: Insights from One Year of Real-World Interactions with an Open-Access Writing Feedback Tool

摘要

Writing is a foundational skill for educational, professional, and civic participation, yet access to frequent and timely writing feedback remains deeply unequal. Teachers face significant workload constraints, particularly in large classes, and many learners lack alternative sources of individualized feedback. While large language models (LLMs) offer the opportunity for scalable, adaptive support, little is known about how students engage with such feedback tools in real-world, self-directed settings. We present a large-scale, year-long analysis of 23,650 voluntary interactions with an open-access AI writing feedback system used by students across diverse educational contexts and age groups, conducted in accordance with strict data protection standards. Using a clustering approach, we identify 2,800 iterative revision chains and apply a validated LLM-based multidimensional scoring framework to assess text quality over time. Our findings reveal that students who revised their texts after receiving AI feedback demonstrated statistically significant, albeit modest, improvements across both content and language-related dimensions (overall writing quality: ∆ = 0.067, p < .001, r = .17), with the greatest gains observed among initially low-performing writers. Revision frequency was positively associated with improvement, particularly in higher-order writing skills. However, engagement was uneven, with higher usage among students in academically oriented schools. These results demonstrate both the technical feasibility and social potential of deploying generative AI for educational support at scale, while highlighting the need for inclusive infrastructure, accessible design, and targeted outreach to truly democratize educational benefits.