Anchoring Concepts: Conceptual Structure and Test Performance

How do anchoring concepts in writing prompts influence essays? Undergraduate students (n = 90) read an assigned textbook chapter and attended lectures and labs, and then were asked to write a 300-word summary of the lesson content. Data consisted of the essays converted to networks and the end-of-unit multiple choice test. Comparing similarity to the expert network benchmark, the essay networks of those who received anchoring concepts were not significantly different from those who did not. However, those who received the anchoring concepts were significantly more like their peers’ essay networks (mental model convergence) and were more like the networks of the two PowerPoint lectures. Furthermore, those receiving the anchoring concepts performed significantly better on the end-of-unit test than those who did not. Term frequency analysis shows that the most network-central concepts had the greatest frequency in the essays, the other terms’ frequencies were remarkably the same for both the anchoring concepts and no concepts groups, suggesting a similar group-level underlying conceptual mental model of this lesson content. To further explore the influence of anchoring concepts in writing prompts, essays were generated with the same two writing prompts using OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Google Bard (i.e., Gemini). The quality of the essay networks for both AI systems were equivalent to the students’ essay networks. More research is needed to understand how including anchoring concepts in a writing prompt (i.e., prompt engineering) influences students’ essay conceptual structure and subsequent test performance.