Author(s):
Title: Assessing the Impact of ChatGPT on Undergraduates’ Engineering Lab WritingBackground: It seems inevitable that engineering undergraduates interact with a generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tool or ChatGPT, the focus of this study, for their writing assignments in the major. Literature review: Literature addressing the impact of ChatGPT and AI on student writing suggests that such technologies can both support and limit students composing and learning processes. Acknowledging the history of writing with technologies and writing as technology, the development of GAI warrants calls for attention to pedagogical and ethical implications in writing-intensive engineering classes. Research questions: How did the use of ChatGPT impact their lab writing in terms of rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking and composing, knowledge of conventions, and writing processes? What are the students’ perspectives on ChatGPT for their engineering lab report writing? Research methodology: A group of undergraduate volunteers (n= 7) used ChatGPT to revise their original engineering lab reports without using ChatGPT. A comparative study was conducted between original lab report samples and revisions by directly assessing sample lab reports in gateway engineering lab courses. A focus group was conducted to learn their experiences and perspectives on ChatGPT in the context of engineering lab report writing. Results/Discussion: The implementation of ChatGPT could improve students’ introduction sections by enhancing audience awareness by providing more context to indicate the overall purpose of the lab experiment as well as more information that is defined or elaborated on technical terms relevant to the study and lab report write-up. From the revisions, some improvements were found in the use and awareness of the IMRDC macrostructure, genre conventions, and style, as the lab report conventions. Improvement in the area of critical thinking, reading, and composing was the most consistently lacking as a result of using ChatGPT while revising. ChatGPT could make the writing processes effective; however, it is not as helpful in suggesting in-depth analysis or significant meaning-making. Conclusions: Implementing ChatGPT in the revision writing process could result in improving engineering students’ lab report quality due to the students’ enhanced lab report genre understanding. The use of ChatGPT also leads students to provide false claims, incorrect lab procedures, or extremely broad statements, which are not valued in the engineering lab report genre.
Coauthors
Aref Majdara, Washington State University, Vancouver, WA; Wendy Olson, Washington State University, Vancouver, WA
