Work-in-Progress: An empirical study to understand how students use ChatGPT for writing essays and how it affects their ownership

TL;DR

This study investigates how students use ChatGPT for essay writing and explores its impact on their ownership of the writing process, aiming to inform educators and improve writing education strategies.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of student interactions with ChatGPT during essay writing and discusses implications for education and assessment.

Findings

Students use ChatGPT to assist with various stages of essay writing.

Use of ChatGPT influences students' sense of ownership over their work.

Insights will guide educators in integrating AI tools into writing instruction.

Abstract

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.