Design assignments with AI in mind

How can you design assignments so that students use AI responsibly—or don’t use it at all?

Many faculty have found themselves thinking differently about their course assignments since generative AI tools have become widely available, and they have taken a variety of approaches to addressing this issue. Some have stopped giving students assignments to complete outside of class, some have integrated student use of AI into their assignments, and some have banned the use of AI tools in their courses altogether. How can you determine which approach is best for your courses and your students? At first this question might seem overwhelming, but approaching this teaching question as a decision that you can approach systematically is key to removing worry and confusion.

This resource will walk you through five phases of thinking and planning to help you make pedagogically sound decisions about having students use (or not use) AI in your assignments. We have purposely broken this work into small steps so that you can work thoughtfully and deliberately, and we encourage you to pause and complete each phase as you read through this resource. We suggest that you engage in these five phases with a particular assignment in mind.

Phase 1: Uncover the role that AI does or does not play in your students’ learning on the assignment

In this phase, you will consider how you want learning to happen in your assignment.

Let’s first acknowledge that this may require a shift in thinking: we often think of assignments as opportunities for students to demonstrate what they’ve learned, a perspective that is often called assessment of learning. Instead, we are encouraging you to consider assignments in a different way: as assessment for learning. This means looking at assignments as opportunities for students not just to show their learning but instead to do the work of learning.

When you clarify for yourself the learning you want students to do in an assignment, you can then explore and articulate whether using artificial intelligence will help them develop the skills you want them to learn. Below are three steps that can help you do this work.

Step 1: Identify the key skills you want students to learn in your assignment.

The first step is to make some notes for yourself about the work that you ask students to do in this assignment. That work, broadly speaking, probably entails developing skills such as problem-solving skills, lab skills, writing skills, research skills, or other broad categories of skills. After you have written notes about these broad categories, consider the subskills under each category that you want your students to learn as they engage in the work of the assignment. Try to be as concrete as possible.

Below are some examples to help you imagine what this list of assignment skills might look like.

Broad category: Problem-solving skills
- Subskill: Identify key dimensions
- Subskill: Identify most salient contextual factors
Broad category: Lab skills
- Subskill: Create concrete plan for entire experiment
- Subskill: Make predictions about potential measurement error
Broad category: Writing Skills
- Subskill: Develop a thesis
- Subskill: Create arguments to defend that thesis

Step 2: Identify the role of artificial intelligence in developing these skills.

After you’ve made your list, ask yourself this question for each skill and subskill: Would artificial intelligence help your students develop this skill? The question is not whether students could use AI to do this work, but instead if using AI will help them develop the skill you’re targeting. You may find it easy to answer “yes” or “no” in some cases, and you may find that you initially have to answer “maybe” until you’ve had a little more time to think! There are no right or wrong answers here: the most important thing is to make sure that your students’ learning is your primary consideration.

Step 3: Articulate why you made your decisions about artificial intelligence.

After you’ve considered whether using AI will help students develop the skills you’re targeting, take some time to articulate for yourself why you think the use of artificial intelligence might help or hinder your students’ learning.

In cases where you answer no, you may find yourself writing things like this: “I want my students to be able to edit writing without any assistance from AI: they need to have their own strongly developed sense of the components of good writing.”

In cases where you answer yes, you may find yourself writing things like this: “I see AI as a thinking partner, so it is okay for students to use AI to generate initial ideas for their essays as long as they are aware that this partner is limited, sometimes wrong or biased, and might hallucinate.”

Phase 2: Provide clear guidance for students on when you do and don’t want them to use AI for your assignment

After you’ve done the work of articulating for yourself how AI will help or hinder students’ learning as they engage with your assignment, it’s important to communicate clearly your thinking to them. The importance of this step can’t be overstated: students need our guidance to make good decisions about using AI on our assignments. It’s not enough to just verbalize this orally; we should make this guidance part of the written assignment descriptions we give to students.

Step 1: Explain how you want students to use (or not use) AI in the assignment.

Using the ideas you’ve drafted about the skills you want students to learn in your assignment and the role AI does or doesn’t play in developing those skills, draft a few sentences in which you explain to your students when you want them to use AI and when you don’t want them to use AI in the assignment. This will become part of the assignment description you give to students (and may also be part of the AI policy you develop for your course).

Step 2: Explain why you want students to use AI (or not use AI) in the assignment

Using the ideas you’ve drafted about the skills you want students to learn in your your assignment and the role AI does or doesn’t play in developing those skills, draft a few sentences in which you explain to your students the reasons that you do or don’t want them to use AI as they develop the skills you want them to learn. This is best framed as explaining how AI will or won’t help them develop the skills and do the learning you want them to do. This will become part of the assignment description you give to students (and may also be part of the AI policy you develop for your course).

Here is an example of how to communicate your thinking from steps 1 and 2 to your students:

Your final project helps you develop two key skills as a historian: research and writing. AI is not a productive technology to use in the research process for our course. When historians work with databases, archives, and complex primary and secondary sources to gather resources and make decisions about which ones to use and why, they are drawing on their analytic skills and also their ethical knowledge of the people, places, and things they study. I want you to learn these valuable skills. If you lean into AI, you won’t develop these skills, and you might produce historical thinking that is inaccurate and even harmful! As to the second key skill of writing, I want you to become more adept at reflecting on your emerging ideas and on your ability to provide evidence for those ideas. Again, this is your work, and I want you to engage with it. However, we can use AI to provide feedback on our historical arguments and I will structure your use of the technology as you do this. Your thinking and writing on each step of our longer history project should be done by you, but we will use AI as an instrument we can turn to give us the feedback we are looking for.

Phase 3: Communicate to your students how your decisions about AI and this assignment will benefit them

Just as our students want help making ethical decisions about using AI in their learning, they want to know how our plans will help them do that learning. When we focus on their learning rather than on their behaviors, students are much more likely to use artificial intelligence appropriately in their assignment.

This means that your assignment description guidelines need to be framed as an inviting and motivating appeal that essentially says, “I want you do this because it will help you learn! This is for you.” Your assignment description guidelines should help them see the learning benefit of what you are suggesting.

Generate some language that explains to students that you and your guidelines are here to help them learn. This is language that should convince them that you have made specific decisions about the use of AI in this assignment because you care about their learning.

Describe how you will help your students regulate their behavior and the temptation to use AI when it is not appropriate to do so on the assignment. (For example, maybe students will have several small pieces of an assignment to turn in, so they don’t need to feel anxious about one high-stakes grading moment. Maybe they will do a lot of work in class with you or get support from peers, tutors, and you, so that they won’t need to be tempted to take short cuts.)Here is an example of communicating the value of your assignment guidelines and why they should adhere to them:

I understand the kind of stressors that undergraduates face, and I know how tempting it is to lean into technology like AI or take other shortcuts when things feel overwhelming. But my guidelines about AI use for your final project are here because I want you to learn how to research and write as a historian: without learning these skills, you will be robbed of an opportunity to be a fuller, more informed person and citizen. Your learning and growth is why I have these guidelines in place. I have created a set of steps that build up to the final project. I know you can handle this without help from AI! Our history project is broken down into small chunks of weekly work and your peers and I will be providing feedback to guide you. And, in some class meetings, I will structure your use of AI to provide feedback on your writing. But you don’t need to use it anywhere else: you will get plenty of support as you work on this assignment, so you don’t need to use AI inappropriately.

Phase 4: Design conversations that help you and your students explore AI in relation to the assignment

When you craft an assignment description for students that specify the ways you do or don’t want them to use AI, students won’t necessarily take your ideas to heart. Clear assignment descriptions and policies aren’t enough to help students pause, reflect, and monitor their own learning and their relationship to AI! Students (and we) need to develop our thoughts about AI and explore artificial intelligence together.

This means that your guidelines are the beginning of a conversation in which you explore and discuss the role of artificial intelligence in your assignment, your course (and your discipline!) with students so that they understand and are motivated to work with your ideas about how they will best learn with your assignment and in your course. Below are four different ways to have this conversation. Read these four plans and make some notes about how you could use one or more of these conversation plans in your course.

Conversation Plan 1 – Making sense of assignment guidelines for AI use

Ask students to read your assignment description guidelines around AI and then have them write down two things they find helpful and two genuine questions they have about your guidelines. Have students share these reactions in small groups and reach consensus on what they find helpful and what questions they’d like to discuss. Have groups share out and then make time for a whole class discussion.

Conversation Plan 2 – Making sense of how AI will or won’t support their learning on the assignment

If you don’t want students to use AI, it is important that you give them an opportunity to consider how doing work without artificial intelligence will help them learn and grow. Alternately, if you do want students to use AI, they need to articulate how this will support their learning.

To facilitate this conversation, ask students to generate their ideas and share those ideas with peers and then with the whole class. Have students respond to prompts like these:

How will completing this assignment (with/ without AI) prepare me for work in other courses or in my major?
How will the work of this assignment (using /not using AI) help me develop as a person beyond my academic work?

Conversation Plan 3 – Exploring the uses and limitations of AI for the assignment

You may want to explore the uses and limitations of AI with your students. This is often best done by having students do some analytic work. For example, you could ask students to evaluate two short arguments, one generated by AI and one by a person. Do not reveal that one argument was AI-generated. Students’ evaluations will allow you and them to uncover some of the problems with arguments generated by AI. If you want students to explore what AI does well have them analyze AI-generated work and consider how it could support their work.

Conversation Plan 4 – Negotiating use of AI on the assignment

If you have decided that students can and should negotiate their use of AI with you (and perhaps with each other), structure that conversation so that they can explore their reasons for wanting or not wanting to use AI.

Have students read through your assignment and then respond to prompts like these:

What step(s) might AI help you with?
What would be some of the drawbacks of using AI on this assignment?
How might you use AI intentionally and critically on this assignment?
How will you document your use of AI if you decide you want to use it?

Phase 5: Require students to document and reflect on their use of AI when it is part of an assignment

You have started sketching out some of the key parts of your guidelines and started to frame those guidelines with the language that best guides, motivates, and teaches your students. Below are two more thinking / writing prompts that will be particularly helpful if you want to have students use AI in your assignment. The first prompt helps you describe how students should document their use of AI. The second prompt helps you describe the ways in which students can negotiate their use of AI with you if this is something you feel comfortable having them do.

Take some time to respond to these prompts:

If you want students to use AI for an assignment, how can you invite them to document that use and learn from it? Explain how this will help them learn. (Keep in mind that you should also document and share your use of AI with your students if you use it in your teaching.)
You may have decided that students can negotiate their use of AI with you on your assignment. Describe clearly what aspects of the assignment are negotiable when it comes to the use of AI. Then describe how this negotiation should take place. What are the steps they need to take? Be sure to explain to them how this will help them learn.

At first, it may seem that they kind of systematic thinking and communication we are suggesting here is overwhelming. However, the time you spend working through these five phases of thinking and planning will allow you to develop greatly as an instructor. Because we all have varying degrees of experience with AI, these kinds of initial explorations of AI in relation to our course assignments will take time. But this work ensures that you can build a disciplinary and pedagogical framework as you continue to consider the role of AI in your course and in your assignments.

References

Bowen, J. A., & Watson, C. E. (2024). Teaching with AI: A practical guide to a new era of human learning. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Goebel, C. Strauss, D., & Tessier, N. (2024, May). AI and Academia: Student perspectives and ethical implications. StudentPOLL Art & Science Group, 17(1). https://www.artsci.com/studentpoll-volume-17-issue-1
Lang, J. M. (2020). Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what you can do about it. Basic Books.