AI Literacy

AI literacy exercises are more about process than product. The emphasis is on critical thinking and reflection. This page contains exercises to facilitate students' close reading and reflection on the strengths and limitations of generative AI:

• Teaching strategies for writing good prompts
• Summarizing and evaluating content 
• Facilitating a discussion around understanding your students' perceptions and how it impacts your discipline

There are a few ways to go about setting up an exercise for students to learn how to write better prompts for Generative AI tools:

• Design a class prompt that you have tested to be a "bad" prompt.
• Have students work in groups to develop their own prompts around course concepts.
• Design a "good" and "bad" class prompt, assign these without telling them which is which, and have them compare and evaluate.

Have groups evaluate the response(s) they receive: 

• Was your question answered? How would you rate the quality of the answer on a scale of 1-5? 
• Is the response too long, too short? Is there information you can tell is not factual? Is there information that is missing that you would consider essential to answering their question? 
• How would you go about revising your prompt to get a better answer? 

While you can immediately go into teaching prompt strategies, you can also have students discuss their ideas, continue revising their prompts, and repeat a close reading of each response until they feel they get a quality response that has answered their question. Instruct students on best practices for prompt engineering and fill in any gaps. 

As a class, have students prompt a Generative AI tool to summarize the main findings of an article, ideally one covering course concepts with which they are already familiar. 

Prompts could include or be variations of the following:

• Summarize the key findings of... 
• Identify the main ideas of...

In groups, have students evaluate the summaries by doing a close reading of the article.

• Did you identify points in the article that support the GAI's output?
• Did you identify points where the GAI's output was incorrect or misleading?
• Are there key themes in the article that you found were missing from the output? In other words, is there missing content you would include in your own summary of the article? 

Introduce a video providing a general overview of Generative AI (they are abundant on YouTube!) and use it to start a conversation with your students on how they see Generative AI impacting their personal, academic, and professional endeavors.

Discussion Questions:

• How do you feel about Generative AI? 
• How are you working Generative AI into your life as a student? Into your everyday life? 
• How do you see AI impacting your future career? 

Use this conversation to introduce an article on how GAI is impacting your discipline and have a conversation with your students. 

• What are the (potential) strengths, limitations, and concerns around the use of GAI in your discipline?

For example, do the privacy concerns around GAI impact your discipline in a unique way? Are there specific functions of GAI tools - or any one GAI tool - that could free up time for other disciplinary pursuits? Ask your students how this article has impacted their thoughts on their academic experience and potential career paths.