Lesson 3 – Prompting and Critical Thinking
Students who learn to create precise, open-ended, and iterative prompts can use AI to support their cognitive engagement. AI prompting helps students refine their problem-solving skills by encouraging them to iterate on their inquiries and seek deeper insights.
Rick Holbeck, Helping Students Develop AI Prompting Skill for Critical Thinking, Faculty Focus
Prompting and Critical Thinking
Becoming an active collaborator with Gen AI involves developing strong prompting skills. By guiding students in iterative prompting and process reflection, teachers can support use of AI as a thinking partner – not just a content generator (Holbeck, 2025).
Gen AI prompting, when purposefully structured, can foster problem solving, critical thinking, analysis, and synthesis while encouraging ethical reasoning (Mollick & Mollick, 2023).
Image created by Microsoft Copilot
Prompting and Critical Thinking
Effective prompting is characterized by the CLEAR framework (Lo, 2024):
CONCISE: Short and to the point – without a lot of unnecessary words.
“What is machine learning and how does it work?” instead of “Please provide a detailed description of machine language and how this technology works.”
LOGICAL: Organized in a clear, logical, and sequenced order.
“Take me through the steps of writing a persuasive essay, from brainstorming to final edits.”
EXPLICIT: Specific about what you want as output (e.g. format, content, or scope).
“Write a 25-minute podcast script explaining the history and evolution of Generative AI”.
ADAPTIVE: Flexible and ready to refine initial prompt results.
If “Provide a 25-minute podcast script explaining the history and evolution of Generative AI” provides a general response, refine it to include “Focus on the history of Generative AI since the introduction of ChatGPT”.
REFLECTIVE: Review and improve prompts to get the best results.
Assess the output quality and adjust your prompt as needed.
From Generative AI Prompting Techniques, Conestoga College
Explore Further
GenAI Chatbot Prompt Library for Educators. AI for Education.
Effective Prompts for AI: The Essentials – MIT Sloan Teaching & Learning Technologies https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/basics/effective-prompts/#Writing_Effective_Prompts