AI in the Writing Process: How Purposeful AI Support Fosters Student Writing
It addresses concerns about AI's impact on student writing by showing that purposefully designed tools can improve learning outcomes, though it is incremental in comparing specific AI methods.
This paper investigated how different AI support approaches affect student writing, finding that an integrated AI writing tool enhanced agency and knowledge transformation compared to a chat-based LLM or control, with students using the integrated tool showing greater engagement.
The ubiquity of technologies like ChatGPT has raised concerns about their impact on student writing, particularly regarding reduced learner agency and superficial engagement with content. While standalone chat-based LLMs often produce suboptimal writing outcomes, evidence suggests that purposefully designed AI writing support tools can enhance the writing process. This paper investigates how different AI support approaches affect writers' sense of agency and depth of knowledge transformation. Through a randomized control trial with 90 undergraduate students, we compare three conditions: (1) a chat-based LLM writing assistant, (2) an integrated AI writing tool to support diverse subprocesses, and (3) a standard writing interface (control). Our findings demonstrate that, among AI-supported conditions, students using the integrated AI writing tool exhibited greater agency over their writing process and engaged in deeper knowledge transformation overall. These results suggest that thoughtfully designed AI writing support targeting specific aspects of the writing process can help students maintain ownership of their work while facilitating improved engagement with content.