UC Irvine receives $10m federal grant for national AI writing research center

The five-year WRITE AI Center will study generative AI in postsecondary writing, develop and test PapyrusAI and run a randomized controlled trial across six community colleges

The WRITE AI Center will study how generative AI can be used in postsecondary writing instruction, including its effects on teaching, learning and student outcomes

The University of California, Irvine School of Education has received a $10 million, five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences to establish a national research center examining how generative AI should be used in postsecondary writing instruction.

The new WRITE AI Center will combine research, technology development and educator training, with a substantial part of its agenda focused on generating evidence rather than simply encouraging AI adoption. Its plans include a national study of the tools colleges are already using, further development of a guided writing platform called PapyrusAI and, in the third year, a randomized controlled trial across six community colleges.

UC Irvine will lead a partnership involving MDRC, the American Council on Education, the California Community Colleges' Digital Center for Innovation, Transformation and Equity working with three participating California community colleges, the Virginia Community College System and Houston City College.

Tamara Tate, Associate Director of UC Irvine's Digital Learning Lab, wrote on LinkedIn that the funding was “the sole award made through IES’s competition for a national research and development center focused on generative AI in postsecondary education.”

The scope of the center reflects how quickly AI has complicated a task universities and colleges have long treated as fundamental. WRITE AI is examining not only whether generative AI can support writing, but what happens to student learning, academic integrity, privacy, bias and student agency when the technology becomes part of the writing process.

Six-college trial will test AI-supported writing instruction

The center's five-year research program starts by asking a deceptively basic question: what generative AI tools are colleges actually using?

WRITE AI plans an ongoing national study covering the tools in use, where and how they are being deployed, instructional features, costs and infrastructure requirements, staff training needs, approaches to safety and fairness, and the evidence currently available about their impact.

Those findings are intended to feed into a publicly accessible, searchable resource for researchers and practitioners.

The research then moves from mapping current practice to testing an intervention. During years one and two, researchers will conduct exploratory work and iterative development. Year three is scheduled to include a randomized controlled trial in first-year composition courses across six community colleges.

The planned trial will examine writing quality and AI literacy alongside student and instructor self-efficacy, access to personalized writing instruction, course retention, student persistence and later performance in writing-intensive courses.

Many of the center's proposed benefits remain research questions rather than established outcomes. WRITE AI is explicitly setting out to test whether AI-supported approaches affect learning and how institutions can implement them responsibly.

Year four will focus on case studies and continued implementation, followed in year five by final analysis, dissemination and implementation guidance. The center says its findings will ultimately inform an Implementation Support Guide for institutions considering AI-supported writing tools.

Mark Warschauer, Distinguished Professor at UC Irvine and Director of the Digital Learning Lab, described that evidence-building role on LinkedIn.

“Through research, tool development, partnerships, and practical resources, the WRITE AI Center will help postsecondary institutions make evidence-based decisions about AI while advancing effective, responsible, and equitable approaches to its use,” he wrote.

PapyrusAI puts instructors between students and the model

A central part of that work will involve PapyrusAI, a web-based generative AI environment originally developed by a UC Irvine research team with National Science Foundation funding.

Rather than giving students unrestricted access to a general-purpose chatbot, the platform uses embedded, research-based prompts intended to structure AI interactions around the writing process. Students can use it while planning, drafting, revising and reflecting, while instructors determine which prompts are available and can adapt them to course objectives and student needs.

WRITE AI says the prompts are designed to encourage students to explain decisions and reflect on their work instead of simply receiving completed writing.

AI literacy is built into the same structure. Students are expected to practice prompting, questioning and evaluating AI responses, including recognizing output that is incomplete or incorrect.

PapyrusAI also includes a multi-agent system for scoring and providing feedback on student writing in alignment with instructor rubrics. The center is studying how instructor-facing analytics could provide information about student needs and AI use, rather than presenting that functionality as a finished evidence-backed intervention.

For institutions, the platform currently supports Google sign-in and access through Canvas. Planned development includes interface improvements, expanded prompt libraries, improved instructor dashboards, additional learning analytics, stronger pedagogical guardrails and integration with Canvas SpeedGrader.

The center describes instructor judgment as central to the model. Its research agenda includes examining how AI can provide personalized support without replacing the writing process itself, alongside questions about data protection, fairness in AI-generated feedback, academic integrity, transparency and students' ability to question AI output.

Training and national collaboration sit alongside the research

WRITE AI is also building a training and capacity-development strand for researchers, educators and institutional leaders who need to evaluate generative AI in education.

Its work will include professional learning, instructional resources and guidance derived from the research program. A UCI professional-learning course on AI in Higher Education is scheduled to begin on September 29, 2026, for higher education instructors and instructional-support professionals.

The partnership brings together expertise in writing research, postsecondary education, educational technology, research and evaluation, and institutional leadership. Writing advisors named in the project include Anna Mills, Skip MacArthur and Steve Graham.

The center's first two years will concentrate on exploratory research and further development of PapyrusAI before the planned six-community-college randomized trial begins in year three.