Exploring ChatGPT’s Impact on Academic Writing: A Study on Time, Motivation, and Disciplinary Differences among University of Dayton First-Year Students

Authors

Presenter(s)

Eva Lonneman, Alexander Nguyen, Nathan Parker, Mia Prisby, Danielle Walusis

Comments

9:40-10:20, Kennedy Union 211

Files

Description

The widespread adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technologies for teaching and learning has significant impacts for how students learn across disciplines. This is especially true for students’ use of GenAI as part of their writing processes and writing assignments, long understood as direct evidence of students’ thinking and learning (Emig 1978; Flower, 1981; Flower & Hayes, 1984). GenAI technologies change how students engage in various aspects of their writing - including planning, writing, and revising - as well as how students represent their learning through human-AI collaboration (Dobrin, 2023). But how do students decide whether and how to use GenAI technologies to complete writing assignments? This project examines the correlation between three primary factors that contribute to GenAI use: time, which characterizes the temporally bound constraints in which students must demonstrate their learning through various kinds of assigned writing tasks; motivation, which characterizes students’ interest and investment in their learning; and disciplinary knowledge, which describes students’ understanding of course content. To investigate these questions, we report on a survey of first-year students regarding their use of the GenAI tool ChatGPT in completing writing and research tasks for course assignments. This survey investigates the relationships between time, motivation, and disciplinary knowledge as their pertain to students’ use of ChatGPT in course assignments. We elaborate upon the survey findings through textual analysis of ChatGPT output as it appears within students’ final written products submitted for course assignments, tracing the ways that students incorporate ChatGPT’s responses to their prompts into assignments, and the role that ChatGPT output plays in students’ writing processes. Taken together, these data provide a clearer understanding of both the factors contributing to student use of ChatGPT and a description how students take ChatGPT output into account when completing writing assignments.

Publication Date

4-23-2025

Project Designation

Course Project - ENG 497 01

Primary Advisor

Patrick W. Thomas

Primary Advisor's Department

English

Keywords

Stander Symposium, College of Arts and Sciences

Recommended Citation

"Exploring ChatGPT’s Impact on Academic Writing: A Study on Time, Motivation, and Disciplinary Differences among University of Dayton First-Year Students" (2025). Stander Symposium Projects. 4207.
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/stander_posters/4207