Postgraduate Students’ Attitude Toward Using ChatGPT in Enhancing Their Master’s Thesis: A Mixed Method Study

Despite a growing body of research exploring Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in educational settings, there is a significant gap in their utilization as aids in Master’s theses regarding attitude, content, and structure. Therefore, this research aimed to investigate postgraduate students’ attitudes toward using ChatGPT to enhance the quality of their Master’s thesis and identify the aspects of thesis writing where ChatGPT is most beneficial from postgraduates’ perspectives. A mixed-method design was implemented using semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire; it includes a sample of 31 postgraduate students, 21 (68 %) females and 10 (32%) males. The findings revealed that postgraduate EFL learners demonstrate a highly positive attitude toward using ChatGPT as an AI assistant tool to improve the quality of their Master’s thesis. Moreover, the findings of the analysis of the interviews revealed that students found ChatGPT to be a source of information, an idea generation and analyzing tool, proofreading support, grammar correction, sentence structure improvement, thesis structure and APA style citation, and a source of instant feedback improving students’ thesis writing. This study is significant because these students turned to ChatGPT as an alternative solution to bridge the gap and improve the overall quality of their thesis writing. This study highlights crucial pedagogical implications for supervisors and teachers to be aware of the potential advantages, ethical issues, and limitations of using ChatGPT to enhance thesis writing and to maintain their role in offering students support and detailed feedback.