AI has potential benefits for learning, but its unreflective use may also inadvertently undermine deep learning and the cultivation of knowledge, skills, and ways of knowing if it is not used purposefully.

First steps in using AI purposefully and effectively to support your learning include understanding how AI works and knowing relevant university, departmental, and course policies. Within the parameters set by Rights, Rules, Responsibilities, your instructors establish the rules for AI use in their courses. Those policies are taken as foundational in the guidance that follows. University and course policies supersede any advice given below. We recommend that the use of AI in your courses be guided by an understanding of how humans learn and the characteristics of academic learning. 

General Advice for Using AI for Learning

As a starting point, it’s crucial to approach using AI with the aim not of replacing your own mental work and cognitive processes, but rather enhancing them. To make the most of this powerful technology, strive to use AI to engage, learn, and study more purposefully, to deepen your understanding, to evoke higher-order thinking, and to assess your level of expertise. 

Purposeful use of AI is essential. To ensure you are using AI in helpful and not harmful ways to your learning, you may want to use a framework for conceptualizing academic learning. The construction of deep, richly connected, well-organized knowledge which can be recalled and utilized to complete tasks such as writing papers, problem-solving, and taking exams often requires multiple engagements with the materials you are learning. Keeping in mind your goals at different junctures of study and the cognitive processes you want to employ will help you use AI purposefully — and not inadvertently use AI in ways that are counterproductive. 

Pre-Learning Phase

The importance of the “pre-learning” phase in academic learning is frequently underestimated. Pre-learning activities are crucial for guiding attention and deepening subsequent engagement and being effective and efficient in learning and studying. Using well-designed prompts, AI can be particularly beneficial in identifying and filling needs for various kinds of prior knowledge which guide these subsequent engagement and learning processes.

Taking-In Phase

Students’ first comprehensive encounter with course instructional materials (e.g. a lecture, assigned reading, lab assignment) is, initially, best focused on making sense and understanding rather than more advanced cognitive processes. Students can intentionally use AI to help them understand the content of these materials in a variety of ways, including filling gaps in materials and weaknesses in their understanding, identifying emergent main ideas and themes, clarifying (or imposing) organizational patterns, and highlighting connections within the material and to other materials, etc.—assuming these are permitted by the instructor. 

Studying Phase

For many academic purposes, achieving a comprehensive understanding (i.e. “comprehending”), while essential, is not sufficient. Comprehending is probably best understood as the basis for other intellective processes and a step toward higher-order thinking and creative uses of your knowledge. Employing more advanced, active, and demanding cognitive processes to manipulate course content are essential to further constructing knowledge. 

AI can support your studying by prompting you to engage in activities that require active, effortful mental processing. Additionally, self-assessment of your knowledge (and skill) level is integral to self-directed studying. AI can be used to help you assess your mastery of course-specific knowledge and skill.

Exam Preparation Phase

Preparing to demonstrate your knowledge on academic tasks and assignments can be conceived of as practicing to “perform,” akin to the role of practice for artistic performances, athletic competitions, etc. Pre-performance practice has a special role in exam prep given the demands of Princeton exams. 

Because exam-level problems and questions are often qualitatively different than problems and questions on homework assignments, preparation for these unfamiliar problems requires additional practice in which you go beyond what was taught to consider what might be examined. Authentic practice of this kind can be hard to come by, so AI might be used to develop course-specific exam-level tasks, problems, and questions. Authentic practice (e.g. practice under exam conditions) can be particularly useful preparation, and might provide the most accurate assessment of one’s current capabilities. With purposeful prompt design, AI may be helpful in creating Princeton exam-level questions and problems with which to practice. 

Within the constraints of University and course policies, AI can be a powerful tool if your intention is to learn deeply and not merely task completion. To use AI purposefully, students should seek to use it to systematically enhance cognitive processes involved in the sequence of phases of academic learning.