Human-Generative AI Collaborative Problem Solving Who Leads and How Students Perceive the Interactions

TL;DR

This study explores how students perceive and experience collaboration with ChatGPT in problem-solving, identifying different collaboration types and their impact on students' sense of agency and interaction quality.

Contribution

It categorizes student-ChatGPT collaboration types and links interaction experiences to perceived agency, providing insights for improving AI-human collaborative learning.

Findings

77.21% students felt they led or contributed equally

15.19% perceived ChatGPT as the leader

67.09% reported positive or mixed interaction experiences

Abstract

This research investigates distinct human-generative AI collaboration types and students' interaction experiences when collaborating with generative AI (i.e., ChatGPT) for problem-solving tasks and how these factors relate to students' sense of agency and perceived collaborative problem solving. By analyzing the surveys and reflections of 79 undergraduate students, we identified three human-generative AI collaboration types: even contribution, human leads, and AI leads. Notably, our study shows that 77.21% of students perceived they led or had even contributed to collaborative problem-solving when collaborating with ChatGPT. On the other hand, 15.19% of the human participants indicated that the collaborations were led by ChatGPT, indicating a potential tendency for students to rely on ChatGPT. Furthermore, 67.09% of students perceived their interaction experiences with ChatGPT to be positive or mixed. We also found a positive correlation between positive interaction experience and a sense of positive agency. The results of this study contribute to our understanding of the collaboration between students and generative AI and highlight the need to study further why some students let ChatGPT lead collaborative problem-solving and how to enhance their interaction experience through curriculum and technology design.