Anne Katrine Westbye
PhD candidate, OsloMet
As a Ph.D. student at OsloMet, my research explores how AI is influencing writing education in schools. With 16 years of experience as a teacher of Norwegian, German, and social studies in upper secondary school, I have seen how AI is changing both how we teach and how students approach writing tasks.
I am curious about how students interact with AI in the writing process and whether this collaboration can help them develop ideas, engage with assignments, and create texts that feel like their own. My research aims to explore what happens when students use AI to support their writing and what this might mean for how we teach writing in the future. I approach these questions with curiosity and a focus on learning from both the possibilities and the challenges AI brings to education.
Tell us about your project!
My PhD project explores how students and AI chatbots interact to co-create meaning, knowledge, and insights during the writing process. Specifically, I investigate the pre-writing and writing phases, focusing on how students communicate with a guiding chatbot, how the chatbot adapts to their needs, and how students integrate chatbot interactions into their texts. The study examines motivation, mastery confidence (*mestringstrygghet*), and ownership in writing, aiming to understand how these factors are influenced by AI.
The project adopts qualitative methods, including analyzing chat logs and conducting in-depth interviews with selected students, complemented by quantitative analysis of chatbot-student interactions. By framing the chatbot as a collaborative actor, inspired by posthumanism and social semiotics, I aim to uncover the dynamics of this partnership and its potential for learning. The findings will contribute to understanding AI's role in reshaping writing education, emphasizing student engagement, creativity, and the evolving nature of literacy in schools.
“ The findings will contribute to understanding AI's role in reshaping writing education, emphasizing student engagement, creativity, and the evolving nature of literacy in schools.”
— Anne Katrine Westbye on her project “Exploring the Role of AI in Writing Education: Interaction, Learning, and Student Engagement”
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