The effect of artificial intelligence-based ChatGPT-based activities on 7th grade students' text writing, critical and creative thinking skills

The main purpose of this study is to reveal the effect of activities created with artificial intelligence ChatGPT on 7th grade students' text writing, critical and creative thinking skills. Explanatory sequential design, one of the mixed research designs, was used in the study. The study group of the research consists of 50 seventh grade students studying in an official secondary school in Muş province in 2023-2024. In the sampling process, the study was conducted with random sampling and the application was carried out for 8 weeks to analyze the students' text writing, critical thinking and creative thinking skills. Throughout the study, data were collected with narrative text writing skill assessment form, creative thinking scale, critical thinking tendency scale and semi-structured interview form. In the analysis of quantitative data, descriptive statistics measures, skewness and kurtosis statistics for normality distribution, independent samples t-test to determine the difference between the measurements of the groups, and dependent samples t-test to compare different measurements of the same group were used. Qualitative data were analyzed by content analysis method. According to the quantitative findings obtained as a result of the research, it was seen that the creative thinking post-test scores of the experimental group were higher than the post-test scores of the control group; there was a significant difference in favor of the experimental group in critical thinking post-test scores, and similarly, there was a significant difference in favor of the experimental group in writing skill post-test measurements. According to the qualitative findings of the study, the students stated in the semi-structured interview forum that the activities prepared with ChatGPT contributed to their creative and critical thinking skills and that there was a significant improvement in their text writing skills thanks to the activities. As a result, the findings revealed that ChatGPT applications supported by artificial intelligence yielded successful results in the development of students' text writing, critical thinking and creative thinking skills. Keywords: Artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, text writing, critical thinking, creative thinking