Duncan P. Brumby

Silvia Bodei, Duncan P. Brumby, Katie Fisher et al.

Despite AI tools becoming increasingly embedded in academic practice, little is known about how university students integrate them into their writing processes. We examine how students engage with AI across different writing tasks, and how this engagement is shaped by individual factors including AI literacy, writing confidence, trust, authorship concerns, and motivation. Study~1 surveys 107 UK university students to map task-specific and co-occurring patterns of AI use across five writing stages (ideation, sourcing, planning, drafting, and reviewing) and their associations with individual factors. Study~2 complements this by exploring how these patterns can be assembled in practice, through interviews with 12 postgraduates reflecting on their established use of AI in assessed writing. Together, the studies suggest that AI integration is selective and heterogeneous, forming three recurring and value-oriented configurations: (1) early-stage (learning-oriented), where tools support exploration and understanding; (2) late-stage (quality-oriented), where tools support drafting and refinement; and (3) peripheral (productivity-oriented), where tools are used to reduce friction and sustain momentum across the process. We offer a workflow-level account of AI-supported academic writing, showing how students navigate competing priorities of learning, quality, productivity, and authorship, and how they evaluate and take responsibility for AI-generated outputs.

Qing Nancy Xia, Advait Sarkar, Duncan P. Brumby et al.

Informal Knowledge Sharing (KS) is vital for end-user programmers to gain expertise. To better understand how personal (self-efficacy), social (reputational gains, trust between colleagues), and software-related (codification effort) variables influence spreadsheet KS intention, we conducted a multiple regressions analysis based on survey data from spreadsheet users (n=100) in administrative and finance roles. We found that high levels of spreadsheet self-efficacy and a perception that sharing would result in reputational gains predicted higher KS intention, but individuals who found knowledge codification effortful showed lower KS intention. We also observed that regardless of occupation, users tended to report a lower sense of self-efficacy in their general spreadsheet proficiency, despite also reporting high self-efficacy in spreadsheet use for job-related contexts. Our findings suggest that acknowledging and designing for these social and personal variables can help avoid situations where experienced individuals refrain unnecessarily from sharing, with implications for spreadsheet design.