PhD project examining how students develop ideas and experience authorship when, during prewriting, they use a chatbot that only asks questions and does not generate text.
The PhD project examines how lower secondary pupils work with a chatbot that only asks questions and never writes text on their behalf. The project is motivated by a pedagogical question: are there ways of using AI in writing instruction that support pupils without taking over their writing?
To investigate this, I follow fifteen eighth-grade pupils through the full process: the conversation with the chatbot, the text they subsequently write on their own, and their own reflections on the work. Through analyses of chatlogs, pupil texts, and pupil interviews, I examine what happens in the conversation between pupil and AI, what content pupils carry over, transform, or add when they write on their own, and how they experience this work themselves.
Three studies
The project consists of three studies: “When AI Only Asks” shows how students and a question-only chatbot co-create forward, redirective and stalled trajectories in prewriting. Through analysis of sensory, memory, reflective and follow-up questions, the article explains how these questions shape the flow and depth of emerging ideas.
«Is There a Text in This Chat? How pupils transform AI dialogue into school texts» examines the relationship between the preparatory work pupils do in dialogue with a chatbot and the texts they subsequently write on their own. The study traces systematically what content from the chatlog is retained, transformed, omitted, or added when pupils write.
A third article uses student interviews to explore how they experience working with a question-only chatbot.
The project analyses AI dialogues, student texts and interviews, and is relevant for schools, teacher education, researchers and technology developers. The goal of the project is to identify how AI can support early idea development in ways that preserve students’ ownership, voice and learning.
Anne Katrine Westbye's publications (nva.sikt.no)
Supervisors
Main supervisor: Marte Blikstad-Balas, Professor, Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo.
