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

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.