Graduate Teacher Education Students Use and Evaluate ChatGPT as an Essay-Writing Tool

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been evolving since the mid-twentieth-century when luminaries such as Alan Turing, Herbert Simon, and Marvin Minsky began developing rudimentary AI applications. For decades, AI programs remained pretty much in the realm of computer science and experimental game playing. This changed radically in the 2020s when commercial vendors such as OpenAI and Google developed generative AI programs (ChatGPT and Bard) using large language modelling (LLM). As a result, generative AI is now being considered for use in all walks of life, including education. In spring 2023, when ChatGPT burst into the public psyche, twenty-five education students in the author's graduate seminar were invited to participate in a qualitative study using ChatGPT as an essay-writing tool. Fifteen accepted the offer. The purpose in doing this was to give students in this seminar the opportunity to use ChatGPT in a supportive environment and to collect qualitative data via descriptive written evaluation and a focus group to comment on their experiences using ChatGPT. All of these students have master's degrees in education and experience as teachers in New York City schools. Their training and experience give them keen insights into pedagogical practice making them ideally suited to evaluate ChatGPT as an essay-writing tool. This article reports on the results of this study. Key findings indicate that the vast majority of these students had a good experience in using ChatGPT for their essays. Many, especially the secondary school teachers, would use it in their own classes.