ChatGPT Prompts for Studying: How to Use AI Prompts to Facilitate Deeper Learning

Key takeaways

To write an effective ChatGPT study prompt, use clear, specific language and provide sufficient context for the model to understand your request. 

• ChatGPT prompts for studying can focus on creating study materials, generating quizzes and practice problems, identifying errors and offering feedback, or helping you explore a topic more deeply.

• When creating prompts, consider the following tips: Assign ChatGPT a specific role, format your prompts effectively, and iterate on your initial prompt by adding context or other relevant details.

• You can learn how to write effective ChatGPT prompts by employing advanced techniques such as generated knowledge, chain of thought, multimodal, and multistep prompting.

Discover the various types of ChatGPT prompts for studying, explore tips for creating effective prompts, and learn how to select the best prompts for your specific needs. If you’re ready to expand your knowledge of AI prompting, enroll in the Google Prompting Essentials Specialization, where, in less than a day, you can learn how to use AI effectively by writing clear and specific prompts. 

Types of ChatGPT prompts for studying

You can create ChatGPT prompts to meet almost any study need, from prompts to generate quizzes and practice problems to those that provide feedback, transform your notes into organized study guides, or stand in as a study partner when you're looking for feedback on your thoughts and ideas. 

Consider the following types of ChatGPT prompts for studying and review, including both simple and advanced prompts for each type. Remember, you can start simple, adding context and adapting your prompts as you go.

Note-taking prompts

Your notes provide an important record of what you’ve learned in class. With effective prompting, ChatGPT can help you maximize the value of your notes when it's time to prepare for learning assessments. Upload your notes and prompt the AI to organize, talk through, simplify, and highlight important concepts. You can even ask the AI to create a study guide from your notes. 

Example prompts: 

Clean up my notes on behavioral psychology and highlight key terms and concepts.

Act as a study tutor helping a second-year psychology student prepare for an upcoming exam on behavioral psychology. Your goal is to organize and condense the uploaded notes into a personalized, easy-to-follow study guide. Organize the notes according to similar topics. Focus on major ideas, key terms, and real-life examples. Use only the uploaded notes. Don’t add content. Organize the study guide by topic, using headings and bullet points to clearly structure the content. Include two short-answer questions at the end of each section.

Quiz and practice prompts

From generating customized practice problems or quizzes based on specific skills you’ve identified to serving as a study partner, using ChatGPT when studying can be beneficial. You can upload your class materials and prompt ChatGPT to use them to create flashcards, a study guide, or a game to help you study.

Example prompts:

Turn the class notes I uploaded into flashcard-style questions.

I have an exam for my Earth Science class. Use the class notes I uploaded to create a practice quiz for me based on the material. Don’t add any extra concepts or details. Use only the content from my notes. Use a multiple-choice format. Ask me questions one by one. After I answer, tell me if I am correct or incorrect. If I am incorrect on my first try, ask me to try again. If I am incorrect on my second try, provide a hint. If I am incorrect on my third try, give me the answer.

Error spotting and feedback prompts

You can use ChatGPT prompts to identify errors in your thinking or to generate feedback on your work. You might provide the AI with assignment parameters and ask it to critique your assignment and offer feedback based on your guidance. You can also prompt the AI to include corrections, explanations, guidance, or hints on how to approach a problem you’re struggling with or one you’ve asked for feedback on. 

Example prompts:

Act as my professor and grade my assignment according to the rubric I uploaded.

You are a college political science professor. Review the essay on capitalism versus socialism that I have written for a second-year college-level political science course. The assignment requires me to explain the role of the state in the economy under each type of system. The writing must be concise and appropriate for a novice on the topic. Identify key strengths in my essay. Suggest specific areas for improvement and provide recommendations on how I can improve. Don’t rewrite for me.

Exploration and deeper learning prompts

ChatGPT prompts that promote exploration and deeper learning can include those that break down big ideas, highlight themes, compare and contrast topics, or employ the Feynman Technique, in which learners solidify their learning by taking on the role of teacher to explain the concept in simple terms, as if to a child. 

Example prompts:

I’m studying earth science. You are a classmate I am teaching the content to. Ask me questions as if you know nothing about the topic.

You are a high school student looking to understand climate patterns. Ask me to explain how energy flow and atmospheric circulation affect climate patterns. After you ask, I will explain the concept to you. You will be responsible for asking me clarifying questions if my answers don’t make sense to you. You will also be responsible for asking “why” questions that will make me think more deeply about the concept. If I give an incorrect answer, tell me that it doesn’t sound right. Give me hints only after I’ve tried to explain three times and haven’t succeeded. When I have explained it so it makes sense to you and is also correct, tell me you understand, and then provide a summary of your understanding. 

ChatGPT prompt for Study Notes

ChatGPT offers a custom GPT called Study Notes [1]. You can use this GPT to create study notes from class materials and other academic sources using simple prompts such as:

• Summarize this document for me.

• Expand on these four key points.

• Provide two examples for each topic in this article.

• Connect these three ideas for me.

Remember, you can iterate on these prompts, adding details as necessary.

Advanced ChatGPT prompts for studying 

If you’re ready to go beyond basic prompting strategies to help with your studies, you can find an array of more advanced prompting techniques, such as generated knowledge prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, multimodal prompting, or multistep prompting. These advanced prompting strategies can often handle more complex tasks and improve the quality of the output you receive from your AI.

Generated knowledge prompting

Generated knowledge prompting is a two-step technique that first prompts an AI to generate background information or facts for a given topic. You can then create a second prompt in which you ask the AI to use the knowledge it generated in response to your original question. By asking the AI to research your question before providing you with an answer, you’re likely to get a more accurate and reasoned response. 

Use case: If you want to explore a specific aspect of gender in American society, for example, you can first prompt ChatGPT to research key historical periods and events relevant to the topic, providing you with relevant materials. After you review the materials, you can ask the AI to suggest a framework that will help you understand the topic more deeply.

Chain of thought prompting

Chain of thought prompting encourages the AI to explain its reasoning, step by step, which can improve performance, especially on complex tasks such as those involving logic, math, or procedural reasoning. You can think of it as the AI showing its work.

Use case: You can use chain of thought prompting when creating practice problem prompts for studying. The step-by-step guidance can deepen your understanding and prepare you to engage with similar problems. 

Multimodal prompting

You can use multimodal prompting in situations where, in addition to text, you have a combination of input data, such as images, tables, or files. Multimodal prompting can understand text and images, including handwriting, to form new ideas by extracting understanding from them.

Use case: Upload an audio clip (with permission) from a lecture or your class notes, and ask ChatGPT to summarize the key points or create a quiz based on the information. Alternatively, you can upload artwork or other images relevant to the subject you’re studying and prompt the AI to analyze them based on visual elements, historical context, or any number of other features.

Multistep prompting

In a multistep prompt, rather than writing a single long and complicated prompt, you break a complex task down into a series of smaller, sequential prompts. The technique can provide more accurate and coherent responses, potentially preventing the AI from “forgetting” your earlier instructions, which can lead to a loss of context and negatively impact your output. 

Use case: A multistep ChatGPT prompt for studying might be:

• Step one: Highlight the key concepts and ideas from this slide presentation on the role of product management in an organization.

• Step two: Expand on the concepts in the first three slides, focusing specifically on the stages of product management.

• Step three: Create a multiple-choice question quiz based on the section you just expanded on.

• Step four: Generate a final essay question that requires knowledge of all the key concepts you identified in the slide show.

How to choose the best ChatGPT prompts for studying

When selecting the best ChatGPT prompts for studying, consider your goals, preferred learning style, and the specific content you’re learning. It may be helpful to think about traditional study strategies that typically lead to deeper learning and how you can apply them when creating AI prompts for studying. 

You can translate the following traditional study strategies into ChatGPT prompts for effective studying:

• Active learning: Prompt ChatGPT to ask you questions about a specific topic, create a quiz for you, or act as a study partner to whom you can explain your content.

• Practice: Choose prompts that require the AI to not only generate problems related to the skill you’re working on but also provide feedback on your answers, hints if you’re struggling, and new problems that focus on the same skill. 

• Visualization: Prompt the AI to create an image, such as a mind map, concept map, or diagram, to help you understand the topic you’re studying.

• Breaking it down: Prompt ChatGPT to break complex processes into manageable parts and explain each part. 

Which ChatGPT mode is best for studying and why?

Although the best mode for studying will likely depend on your needs, ChatGPT’s Study Mode, a new feature that provides learners with open-ended guidance to support deeper learning, may be a good option overall [2]. Study Mode, which was developed in collaboration with teachers, scientists, and pedagogical experts, encourages active participation, metacognition, self-reflection, and curiosity while managing learners’ cognitive load and providing actionable feedback. Attention to these research-backed behaviors makes ChatGPT’s Study Mode a valuable starting point for using AI for studying.

How do I prompt ChatGPT to help me study effectively?

The key to creating effective ChatGPT prompts for studying is to ensure they are clear and specific, and provide sufficient context for the AI to understand what you're asking and what you’re trying to learn. To increase the effectiveness of your prompts, view prompting as an iterative process, refining as necessary. 

Acronyms, such as CLEAR (concise, logical, explicit, adaptive, and reflective), CRAFT (context, role, action, format, and target), CREATE (character, request, examples, adjust, type, and extras), and PACE (purpose, action, context, explain), offer handy ways to remember the fundamentals for creating prompts that can help you study more effectively. 

For example, when creating ChatGPT prompts for studying, ensure your prompts are CLEAR:

Concise

Include context as well as the important words related to your topic, but omit “filler” words that don’t add to the specificity of your prompt. 

Logical

Because AI tools look for relationships between words and concepts, structuring your request naturally and logically in a way that would make sense to a human study partner can help ensure a more relevant and accurate response. 

Explicit

Provide your AI tool with clear instructions on what you want it to do and specify the expected output. You might consider providing an example of what you want the AI’s response to look like or of the tone or style you’d like the response to reflect. Specifying who the output is for (the audience) can also help improve your AI’s response. 

Adaptive

Iterating on your initial prompt based on the response you receive is essential for improving your results. You can adjust wording, add more context, or ask the AI to exclude certain words or concepts. Use important words or ideas the AI provided in its initial output as guidance for creating a second or third prompt.

Reflective

Always evaluate the responses you receive from your AI. Consider whether the output makes sense to you, given what you know. Ensure the information you receive is both complete and correct, adding additional prompting when necessary. Provide the AI feedback about what was useful and what could use improvement. You can even ask the AI to evaluate itself.

Read more: What Is Prompt Engineering? Definition and Examples

Common prompting problems and tips to avoid them

With just a little bit of practice, you can avoid common prompting problems that can lead to outputs that are too vague, long, advanced, simple, or off-topic. Consider the following tips for troubleshooting AI responses that don’t meet your needs.

If your responses are:

• Too vague or general: Add context, including background information related to language, tone, audience, output format, content theme, and the overall goal of your content.

• Too long: Add details related to your output expectations, such as a specific number of sentences or words you expect your output to adhere to.

• Too off-topic: Rephrase your question by adding context or guidance, such as including examples or telling the AI not only what not to do, but also what to do, for instance. Evaluate your prompt for imprecise or “fluffy” descriptions.

• Too advanced or too simple: Assign a role, identify an audience, ask for a simpler or more technical explanation, or ask for an example or for additional context to increase or decrease the complexity of the output. 

Other tips to keep in mind:

• Hold realistic expectations: Remember that the AI doesn’t understand the meaning behind your prompts and that AI systems can generate inaccurate or biased content, making it essential that you have an understanding of the topic you're prompting toward and that you review the output you receive. 

• Format effectively: Put your instructions first, and use clear separators, such as hashtags or quotation marks, to distinguish between the instructions and context.

• Maintain ethical use: Before using AI for any educational purpose, check your school’s and instructors’ expectations regarding AI use and ethics.

• Stay updated: It may be easier to write more effective prompts when using the most up-to-date model available.

Explore free learning resources

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• Watch on YouTube: Prompt Engineering: A Beginner’s Guide

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• Explore AI use cases: Open for a Primer on AI, ChatGPT and More

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