Turnitin Clarity: Informed by and designed for educators to help inspire authentic learning

Principal Product Manager, Charlotte Perry-Houts, shares how prioritizing unfiltered educator feedback helped Turnitin adjust product functionality to solve real-world classroom challenges and shape Turnitin Clarity—a process deeply informed by partnerships with institutions like O’Fallon Township High School. By focusing on pedagogical transparency in the AI era, we’ve collaborated with practitioners throughout our global beta to empower learning integrity from the ground up.

Co-creating Turnitin Clarity with educators: Our development approach

When we started to develop Turnitin Clarity in 2024, we were responding to a growing need for greater transparency into the student writing process. But we didn’t want to assume what that looked like. We needed practitioners who were on the ground navigating the AI tension.

Turnitin Clarity is the formative layer inside Turnitin Feedback Studio that emerged from this need. Alongside Turnitin Originality, it creates a three-part ecosystem for learning integrity that was shaped through a global feedback pool of nearly 200 instructors and students.

While feedback spanned dozens of institutions globally, central to our beta program were core sites across Secondary and Higher Education where our team conducted intensive on-site workshops. These sessions allowed us to test workflows including assignment creation and report reviews in real-time. Since launch, we’ve continued this grassroots approach with on-site visits to institutions to observe live usage and keep the product DNA rooted in the classroom.

A deep dive into a research partnership with O’Fallon

We brought this approach to life through our work with O’Fallon Township High School.

As a beta partner, O’Fallon tested early versions of the tool in real classrooms, providing real-world feedback that shaped our designs and roadmap. Beta feedback provided a level of insight that one-off usability tests cannot replicate, helping us check our early assumptions against the actual roadblocks teachers run into during a live assignment. This collaboration proved that learning integrity is a proactive framework that prioritizes the integrity of the process of learning over the final product.

Which Turnitin Clarity features were directly inspired by O’Fallon educators?

Educator-led design and formative feedback from O’Fallon Township High School led to three critical enhancements to Turnitin Clarity’s product features:

Narrative playback

The ability for teachers to view video playback of student composition activity. The early iteration of Turnitin Clarity relied on a version history model that proved to be too click-heavy for a fast-paced classroom and added unnecessary cognitive load for busy teachers. By shifting to version history playback in Turnitin Clarity, we allowed teachers to interpret composition data at a glance and focus on students' thinking.

Download flexibility

When O’Fallon High School started using the beta version of Turnitin Clarity, we noticed a manual workaround where teachers were printing and stapling reports to facilitate peer review. This early signal made it clear that we needed to build more flexibility for how work is shared and exported. Providing digital access for peer review allows students to act as "thinking partners" for one another, strengthening metacognition across the cohort.

Multi-submission iteration

The ability to view work-in-progress and provide formative feedback. Because the writing process is rarely a “one-and-done” activity, we changed the workflow to allow multiple submissions, ensuring instructors could intervene early and see progress before the due date. Turning the submit button from an endpoint into a formative intervention tool supports ongoing teacher-student dialog.

Since beginning the beta testing in 2024, O’Fallon has processed almost 6,000 submissions and counting. Validating a tool through real-world testing in a live classroom application is the only way to ensure technology serves as a catalyst for student success.

What is the future of "designed for educators" at Turnitin?

Our strong partnerships with institutions continues to shape the future of Turnitin Clarity. By keeping our product DNA rooted in teacher agency, we can ensure our technology adapts to the grassroots needs of every classroom.

I am extremely grateful for O’Fallon’s ongoing advocacy, because technology should revolve around education, not the other way around. Our focus remains on supporting a world where technology serves as a foundation for literacy and growth.