Strategies I Employed for Enhancing My AI-focused Content Composition
In the rapidly evolving world of education, the importance of writing effective AI prompts is becoming increasingly evident. This is especially true as AI tools like ChatGPT are being integrated into classrooms to assist teachers and students.
One strategy for writing AI prompts is the CRE Framework, which stands for Context, Role, and Expectation. By clearly specifying the educational setting and background (Context), defining the AI’s role (e.g., "assume you are a math tutor"), and articulating what you want (Expectation), teachers can help the AI understand the purpose and constraints, improving the relevance and focus of outputs.
Leveraging existing well-crafted prompts can also be beneficial. Research and communities offer a wealth of example prompts and prompt catalogs, such as the prompt catalog by White et al. (2023) or Correia and Hickey’s best practices. These provide tested templates and formatting for common educational needs.
Advanced prompting techniques, like Chain-of-Thought prompting and Least-to-Most prompting, can further optimize output quality. Chain-of-Thought prompting guides the AI through structured reasoning steps, while Least-to-Most prompting progressively drills down from general to specific requests.
An iterative process is key to refining AI prompts. Start with simple prompts and refine them by adding context, examples, or meta-prompting where the AI critiques and improves your prompt. This approach uncovers optimal phrasing and the precise amount of detail needed for desired outputs.
Defining pedagogical goals and learner characteristics is also crucial. Including learning objectives, student proficiency levels, or instructional strategies in prompts helps generate differentiated, contextually relevant materials that fit diverse classroom needs.
After prompt execution, it's essential to review AI-generated materials for accuracy, bias, and alignment with educational goals before classroom use, ensuring responsible integration.
The Common Sense Media course offers a library of AI prompts that can be customized. A helpful prompt for creating a rubric is provided: "You are an expert teacher and curriculum writer, skilled in creating assessments and evaluating student work. Your task is to create a rubric for my [GRADE LEVEL AND SUBJECT] class studying [TOPIC]. My students are completing [ASSIGNMENT TITLE], in which they [ASSIGNMENT DESCRIPTION]. Format the rubric as a chart and include a 5-point scale."
Experimenting with existing prompt templates can also help yield more effective outputs from an AI. The course titled "5 Ways To Use ChatGPT To Prepare For Class" may provide additional insights and strategies for AI prompt writing.
Understanding the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of AI is important, especially for educators who want to share this knowledge with students. Furthermore, understanding AI prompt writing can give educators a better sense of how students might use AI to cheat. Better AI prompt writing can also help save time for educators, allowing for more interactions with students.
Embracing an iterative process in prompt writing, where adjustments and tweaks are made if the initial prompt doesn’t work, can lead to better understanding and more effective outputs from AI. The free course developed in partnership between Common Sense Media and OpenAI provides a valuable resource for teachers looking to harness the power of AI in their classrooms.
References:
[1] White, E., Correia, T., & Hulstijn, J. H. (2023). A catalog of AI prompts for education. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.14403.
[2] Roller, M., & Choi, J. (2022). Chain-of-thought prompting: Leveraging human intuition for AI. arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.08328.
[3] Weidinger, T., & Bender, D. (2021). Meta-learning to adapt language models to new tasks with few training examples. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.07513.
- To improve the AI's understanding and focus in a math class, a teacher might use an AI prompt that specifies the educational setting, defines the AI's role as a math tutor, and articulates a math problem to solve.
- An advanced AI prompting technique called Chain-of-Thought prompting can help guide the AI through structured reasoning steps, resulting in more precise and relevant outputs.
- For effective learning in an online education environment, teachers can use AI prompts that are contextually relevant, differentiated, and aligned with specific educational goals.
- By reviewing the AI-generated materials for accuracy, bias, and alignment with learning objectives, teachers can ensure the responsible integration of AI in education and self-development.
- Understanding the strengths and limitations of AI can help educators make informed decisions about how to use AI tools for teaching and assessment, as well as to educate students on ethical AI use.
