GenAI Prompt Literacy in Higher Ed Teaching and Learning
Generative AI is no longer a novelty on campus; it's a reality in our classrooms. Students are using GenAI for everything from brainstorming ideas to drafting essays. While your primary, valid concern may be academic integrity, an equally important question is, “Are we teaching our students how to use these tools to be better thinkers?”
The key to unlocking the true academic potential of GenAI lies in a new, essential skill: prompt literacy. This post, a companion to my presentation on the same topic, “AI in Education: Unlocking the Power of Prompts,” explores what prompt literacy is, how you can leverage it in the administrative work of teaching, and how you can cultivate it in your students.
What is Prompt Literacy, and Why Does It Matter?
Prompt literacy is the ability to strategically design, refine, and critically evaluate prompts to achieve desired outcomes from an AI system.
It’s the difference between asking a simple question and artfully instructing a powerful tool. In higher education, prompt literacy is paramount because it fosters critical thinking, enhances learning, and prepares students for the future.
Crafting a good prompt requires students to clarify their own thinking, define the scope of their inquiry, and specify their analytical needs. Also, by using AI as a Socratic tutor or a sophisticated research assistant, students can explore complex topics more deeply and receive instant, personalized feedback.
Most crucially, interacting with AI is becoming a fundamental component of countless professions. Teaching prompt literacy is teaching a core competency for the modern workforce.
At the same time as we are thinking about our questions, we must remember that the tool is not really “answering” us; it is reading algorithms that help it analyze and interpret human language patterns. Eventually, we must take its output and verify, adapt, or invalidate it before we fold it into our own work or thinking.
But First, the Research
Yep. I get it. You want some evidence that adding these tools to your teaching is sound pedagogy, and evidence exists – and it is proliferating rapidly. Here are some ideas that have borne out in related research:
- We are still teaching genre, voice, and audience. You can teach your students to use AI to help them learn these critical writing skills. found confidence levels in user prompts affects AI-generated text. AI tools used in this study detected confidence in writing elements like specificity, stirring language, and absence of hedging.
- Prompt writing is a tool for human agency. and many others since have argued for a “human-in-the-loop” approach (writer-centric) that allows humans to maintain their agency over AI by controlling its output through well-engineered prompts.
- The better the prompt, the sounder the output. showed high-quality prompts (in terms of context, mission, specificity, and clarity) resulted in more accurate LLM-generated outputs. They argued for the importance of teaching and learning theory-driven prompt design to mitigate hallucination.
The Anatomy of an Effective Prompt
So how do we teach our students to write in this unique genre? Moving them from simplistic questions to sophisticated, creative, agentic prompts is a key pedagogical goal. A powerful prompt goes beyond a single sentence. It is:
Specific and Detailed
Vague inputs yield generic outputs. The more detail, the better the result. For example:
"Explain the primary social and economic factors leading to the French Revolution. Write it for a first-year undergraduate audience, and structure the answer with a clear introduction, three main body points, and a concluding summary."
Explicit About Format
Don't leave the output structure to chance. For example:
"Generate a bulleted list of counterarguments,"
"Create a table comparing these two theories," or
"Draft an email in a formal tone."
Define a Tone or Role
Instructing the AI to adopt a persona can dramatically change the tone, style, and focus of its response. For example:
"You are a skeptical historian. Analyze the following primary source document and identify—" or
"You are an experienced grant writer within the field of marine conservation. Write a first draft of—"
Contextual
The tool needs the necessary background to understand the task as fully as it can. This could include excerpts from readings, key terms, or the specific academic framework you want it to use.
Iterative and Adaptive
Teach students that prompting is a dialogue. They should refine their prompts, ask follow-up questions, and challenge the AI's initial responses to dig deeper.
Teaching Prompt Literacy to Students
Equipping students with these skills doesn't always require a complete course overhaul. You can integrate prompt literacy into your existing curriculum with these strategies:
- Model and "prompt aloud": Dedicate class time to demonstrating how you craft a prompt. Walk students through your thought process, showing them how you refine it based on the AI's output. This demystifies the process.
- Introduce prompting frameworks: Give students a mental model for building prompts. Acronyms can provide a memorable structure, like CAST (Criteria, Audience, Specifications, Testing); CREATE (Character, Request, Examples, Adjustments, Type of output, Extras); and CRAFT (Context, Role, Action, Format, Tone).
- Encourage critical evaluation: Make it standard practice for students to fact-check, critique, and analyze AI-generated content for accuracy and bias. Frame AI output as a "first draft" created by an intern; it’s useful but always in need of expert review.
Ready to put this into practice? Here are a few ideas for in-class activities to get started, though you’ll likely come up with many more.
One approach is to use AI as a tutor by having students ask it to explain a difficult course concept in five different ways (such as through an analogy, in terms a 10-year-old could understand, or even as a short poem).You can then have students analyze the output to see which were most effective/accurate. You can also run a “Fix the prompt” workshop, where students are given a weak, generic prompt and work together in groups to refine and improve it based on a specific learning objective.
Another engaging activity is to organize a debate with an AI: assign students a position on a course-related topic and have them participate in a structured debate with the AI, which is prompted to argue the opposing viewpoint as a skilled debater.
The Way Forward
By practicing and teaching prompt literacy, we shift the conversation from simply using AI to collaborating with it. We empower our students to become discerning, agile thinkers who can leverage technology to deepen their learning, not circumvent it. Simultaneously, we can use the tools to empower ourselves. By embracing AI as a personal productivity partner, we can streamline our administrative loads, accelerate our research, and reclaim valuable time to focus on the mentorship and high-impact work that matters most.
This dual approach, one of modeling and discussing our use of tools we then teach our students use, creates a richer, more authentic learning environment for everyone.
The next step for you? It’s simple: approach this technology with the same intellectual curiosity that defines our profession. Our task is not merely to adopt this technology, but to integrate it into our work with intention, purpose, and a critical eye, teaching our students to do the same. Now is the moment to move from observation to active engagement, shaping these tools to serve our academic mission.
References
Jacobsen, L. J., & Weber, K. E. (2025). The promises and pitfalls of large language models as feedback providers: A study of prompt engineering and the quality of AI-driven feedback. AI, 6(2), 35.
Ponce, T. M. (2024). AI resume writing: How prompt confidence shapes output and AI literacies. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly.
Ranade, N., Saravia, M. & Johri, A. Using rhetorical strategies to design prompts: a human-in-the-loop approach to make AI useful. AI & Society, 40, 711–732 (2025).