Workshop Paper: An empirical study to understand how students use ChatGPT for writing essays and how it affects their ownership
For educators and essay readers, this study aims to understand student-AI interaction in writing, but it is incremental as it only proposes a study without results.
This workshop paper outlines a planned user study to investigate how students use ChatGPT for essay writing, focusing on the queries they ask and the responses they receive, with the goal of informing educators and evaluators about the impact on writing education and evaluation.
This paper was a Workshop Paper. See the full paper which will be presented at CHI 2026: arXiv:2501.10551; As large language models (LLMs) become more powerful and ubiquitous, systems like ChatGPT are increasingly used by students to help them with writing tasks. To better understand how these tools are used, we investigate how students might use an LLM for essay writing, for example, to study the queries asked to ChatGPT and the responses that ChatGPT gives. To that end, we plan to conduct a user study that will record the user writing process and present them with the opportunity to use ChatGPT as an AI assistant. This study's findings will help us understand how these tools are used and how practitioners -- such as educators and essay readers -- should consider writing education and evaluation based on essay writing.