AI for Students: A Guide to ChatGPT

How can ChatGPT help instructors (Davi, 2023) - University of Arizona's UCATT recommends using ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas for lesson plans.

Using AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including Prompts (Mollick & Mollick, 2023) - opeen access article. 

ChatGPT and Beyond: How to Handle AI in Schools (Elgersma, 2024) - article in Common Sense Education website. 

ChatGPT in Classrooms: Transforming Challenges into Opportunity in Education (Munawar & Misrilis, 2024) - article available (open access) from Cornell University database. 

AI in the Classroom: Exploring students' interaction with ChatGPT in programming learning (Güner & Er, 2025) - article available (open access) from Springer Nature Link database. 
 

From The University of Ariziona Libraries AI Literacy in the Age of ChatGPT Guide

What is prompting?
Simply, it's what you type into the chat box.

The way you prompt makes a huge difference in the output that ChatGPT gives you. So it's worth learning some tips.

Always verify the information it gives you.
Think of ChatGPT as your personal intern. They need very specific instructions, and they need you to verify the information.

ChatGPT sometimes makes things up. That's because it's designed to write in a way that sounds like human writing. It's not designed to know facts.

Tips for writing effective prompts

1. Give it some context or a role to play.
2. Give it very detailed instructions, including how you would like the results formatted.
3. Keep conversing and asking for changes. Ask it to revise the answer in various ways.

Examples

1. A role could be, "Act as an expert in [fill in the blank]." 
   Act as an expert community organizer.
   Act as a high school biology teacher.
   Act as a comedian.
    
2. Example prompt:
   Act as an expert academic librarian. I’m writing a research paper for Sociology and I need help coming up with a topic. I’m interested in topics related to climate change. Please give me a list of 10 topic ideas related to climate change.
    
3. Example of changes: (keep conversing until you get something useful)
   Now give me some sub-topics or research questions for [one of those topics]. And give me a list of keywords and phrases I can use to search for that topic in library databases and Google Scholar.
    

   Or...

   I didn't like any of those topics. Please give me 10 more.

Generate Topics for Your Research Paper with ChatGPT - a guide for students from the University of Arizona Libraries. ChatGPT can be a useful tool when it comes to deciding what your topic should be for a research paper. We've created this guide for use with students.

Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT  - Coursera course by Dr. Jules White, Vanderbilt University.

Three ways to leverage ChatGPT and other generative AI in research - Times Higher Education
Ideas for using ChatGPT for (1) to determine a hypothesis or question; (2) research method: follow an accepted research method or invent a new method or algorithm to conduct an investigation that resolves or answers the question; and (3) research output: formulate, evaluate, and document the solution to enable further research.

From The University of Ariziona Libraries AI Literacy in the Age of ChatGPT Guide
 

1. Sometimes it gets confused if you change topics in the middle of a conversation. When you want to change the subject, start a new chat.
    
2. It will remember what you've said in the course of a conversation, so you don't have to repeat everything again. Just continue like you're talking to your intern.
    
3. Don't ask ChatGPT for a list of sources. It will often make them up. Instead use library search, library databases, or Google Scholar. It can search the web now (as of late 2024), but even with that feature activated, some of the sources may not exist.
   See I can’t find the citations that ChatGPT gave me. What should I do?
    
4. Choose an output format. In addition to paragraphs it can give you a table, a bulleted list, ascii art, multiple choice quiz questions, emojis, computer code, and more.
    
5. In ChatGPT you can see a history of your conversations. You can go back to a previous conversation and continue it. If you like, in the settings you can delete your history and turn off the saving of future history. You can also export your history and save it on your own computer.
    
6. Remember, don't enter any personal, private data in ChatGPT, because OpenAI may use your input to help improve the model. The free version is a research experiment.  If you don't want your data used to help improve ChatGPT, you can turn it off in the settings. Go to your name, then Settings, then Data Controls and turn off, "Improve the model for everyone."

Generate Topics for Your Research Paper with ChatGPT - a guide for students from the University of Arizona Libraries. ChatGPT can be a useful tool when it comes to deciding what your topic should be for a research paper. We've created this guide for use with students.

UA Guidelines for Syllabus Statements About Generative AI - PDF Document - this is an example of Policy guidelines for Generative AI in higher education settings. 

Why Does chatGPT make up fake academic papers? (David Smerdon, University of QLD on Twitter [X] thread, 2023) - a very good explanation. 

Brief Tutorials from the University of Arizona Libraries: 

1. The Technology behind ChatGPT
2. How does ChatGPT aim to prevent harmful use?
3. What is generative AI?
4. Using ChatGPT effectively.
5. Creating multimedia with AI Tools. 
   
    

Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT  - Coursera course by Dr. Jules White, Vanderbilt University.