Revisiting Subject-Verb Agreement Mastery: The Effectiveness of Chatbots as Practice Tools

With AI tools such as ChatGPT in the fast-changing education domain, there is a potential scope for improving student learning through integration. The effectiveness of ChatGPT as a practice partner in enabling mastery of subject-verb agreement among senior high school students was investigated in this study. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design was ut which involved eighty (80) eighty senior high school students from Lala Proper Integrated School. The learners accessed ChatGPT for one hour per day for five consecutive days to answer subject-verb agreement exercise questions. Their grammatical ability was measured using a teacher-made test before and after the intervention. The mean score rose from 15.6 (pretest “Fair”) to 21.4 (posttest “Good”), so the mean difference reaped is 6.00 points. This mean difference signifies considerably higher average pretest to posttest scores or very likely an academic gain coincidence with the intervention. Since the assumption of normality was not met, a Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used in lieu of a parametric test. The fact that the test statistic value is 0.00ᵃ, meaning the sum of the ranks of the differences is so extremely small, occurs when most of the students scored better on the posttest than the pretest to an extreme degree – a strong indication of consistent improvement throughout the sample. The accompanying p-value of <.001 implies that there exists less than a 0.1% chance that this consistent upward trend was a result of mere chance. In other words, results are statistically very significant, the probability of such a level of change occurring, through random chance is low extreme. These findings confirm that ChatGPT used as a practice partner, positively and quantitatively affected student competence for mastery in the subject-verb agreement. The interactive and reactive nature of the chatbot may have also been influential to the students’ engagement, confidence and the understanding of grammar rules. Therefore AI-based instruments such as ChatGPT demonstrate a lot of promise in helping to supplement traditional instruction and to solve persistent problems associated with grammar in the classroom.