NIRVANA: A Comprehensive Dataset for Reproducing How Students Use Generative AI for Essay Writing

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jelson, Andrew, Manesh, Daniel, Lee, Sangwook, Jang, Alice, Dunlap, Daniel, Maddox, Tamara, Kim, Young-Ho, Lee, Sang Won
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Jelson, Andrew
Manesh, Daniel
Lee, Sangwook
Jang, Alice
Dunlap, Daniel
Maddox, Tamara
Kim, Young-Ho
Lee, Sang Won
author_facet Jelson, Andrew
Manesh, Daniel
Lee, Sangwook
Jang, Alice
Dunlap, Daniel
Maddox, Tamara
Kim, Young-Ho
Lee, Sang Won
contents With the rapid adoption of AI writing assistants in education, educators and researchers need empirical evidence to understand the impact on student writing and inform effective pedagogical design. Despite widespread use, we lack systematic understanding of how students engage with these tools during authentic writing tasks: when they seek assistance, what they ask, and how they incorporate AI-generated content into their essays. This gap limits evidence-based policy development and rigorous evaluation of generative AI's learning effects. To address this gap, we introduce NIRVANA, a dataset capturing how university students use generative AI while writing an analytical essay. The dataset includes 77 students who completed an essay task with access to ChatGPT, recording keystroke-level writing behavior, full ChatGPT conversation histories, and all text copied from ChatGPT, enabling a complete reconstruction of the writing process and revealing how AI assistance shapes student work. Our analysis identifies key behavioral patterns, including variation in ChatGPT query frequency and its relationship to essay characteristics such as length and readability. We identify four writing profiles based on students' contribution and revision patterns: Lead Authors, Collaborators, Drafters, and Vibe Writers. To support deeper investigation, we developed a replay interface that reconstructs the writing process; qualitative analysis of sampled replays demonstrates how this tool enables systematic examination of student-AI interactions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_07344
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NIRVANA: A Comprehensive Dataset for Reproducing How Students Use Generative AI for Essay Writing
Jelson, Andrew
Manesh, Daniel
Lee, Sangwook
Jang, Alice
Dunlap, Daniel
Maddox, Tamara
Kim, Young-Ho
Lee, Sang Won
Human-Computer Interaction
With the rapid adoption of AI writing assistants in education, educators and researchers need empirical evidence to understand the impact on student writing and inform effective pedagogical design. Despite widespread use, we lack systematic understanding of how students engage with these tools during authentic writing tasks: when they seek assistance, what they ask, and how they incorporate AI-generated content into their essays. This gap limits evidence-based policy development and rigorous evaluation of generative AI's learning effects. To address this gap, we introduce NIRVANA, a dataset capturing how university students use generative AI while writing an analytical essay. The dataset includes 77 students who completed an essay task with access to ChatGPT, recording keystroke-level writing behavior, full ChatGPT conversation histories, and all text copied from ChatGPT, enabling a complete reconstruction of the writing process and revealing how AI assistance shapes student work. Our analysis identifies key behavioral patterns, including variation in ChatGPT query frequency and its relationship to essay characteristics such as length and readability. We identify four writing profiles based on students' contribution and revision patterns: Lead Authors, Collaborators, Drafters, and Vibe Writers. To support deeper investigation, we developed a replay interface that reconstructs the writing process; qualitative analysis of sampled replays demonstrates how this tool enables systematic examination of student-AI interactions.
title NIRVANA: A Comprehensive Dataset for Reproducing How Students Use Generative AI for Essay Writing
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07344