Empowering Teaching With Prompt Engineering: How to Integrate Curriculum, Standards, and Assessment for a New Age

Introduction: An Instructor’S Viewpoint

Prompt engineering holds promising opportunities for classroom instruction. At present, there is great curiosity, apprehension, and lack of knowledge when it comes to seeing how prompt engineering can be utilized in the classroom. For instructors, embracing the promise of prompt engineering will be arduous. Instructors in this chapter, denotes teachers of elementary, secondary, and post-secondary students. Prompt engineering can be defined as the creation of organized text to bring about outputs that reflect a desired goal or objective. The reason for this difficulty has less to do with the lack of instructor knowledge or access to technology, than it does with the influence of the educational paradigm. We can define a paradigm as the formal and informal understandings, actions, and words of an organized group. At present, if an instructor wishes to teach different skills or focus on certain parts of the curriculum that they have struggled to convey, there is no shortage of packaged curriculum materials or textbooks for that instructor to use. While this change may take time for the instructor implement, what the new curriculum requires of the teacher in the presentation of content and what they emphasize in terms of assessment, compared to what the instructor is already using, is not that far apart. Prompt engineering is entirely different and will require key instructional and assessment shifts for implementation to be successful.

Prompt engineering adoption in the classroom is not a matter of learning a new pre-packaged curriculum or set of standards. Prompt engineering requires a reconfiguration of how the instructor views their role and carries out instruction. The instructor alone no longer becomes the main source by which most concepts and knowledge are imparted to students. The instructor moves from providing smaller basic units of knowledge entirely, to teaching basic units of knowledge through the tool or medium, of prompt engineering. Prompt engineering becomes the college or secondary instructor’s power point. It is the new textbook or base structure from which instruction originates. The researching of a topic at all levels is accelerated in complexity and greater depth with prompt engineering as it is fundamentally different than just “Googling” questions or trying to find “the answer.” In learning to use prompt engineering, students require guidance in creating engineered prompts and the “search” requires greater complexity. Students must be guided to evaluate the quality of the prompts they create. Students learn through a series of trials and errors, how to refine their ability to formulate prompts which will elicit detailed, accurate information and evaluate the resulting output that they have engineered.

Prompt engineering implementation in the classroom will also require a shifting in how assessment occurs in the classroom. A common concern about prompt engineering is that it is merely a tool for students to engage in cheating (Cotton et al., 2023). I would argue that this concern stems from how prompt engineering fundamentally alters classroom instruction and assessment, rendering a good number of assessments “dead” as they are disconnected from the higher level of engagement, and it dispatches simplistic, lower-level questions with ease as they lack higher order operations. Prompt engineering includes but transcends contemporary assessment types due to how it is used by students to plan, prioritize informational inputs, continue to work with information, and problem-solve.

The “cheating” that prompt engineering creates is less a product of cheating, than it is a demonstration of how contemporary assessments become easy prey to prompt engineering due to an assessment’s limited complexity or if it consists primarily of basic recall and reproduction of knowledge. A prompt engineering entry of: “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” will elicit an equally black and white answer that is not challenging or complex in nature. In answering this question, prompt engineering is used at the basic level of knowledge retrieval. As this example shows, a basic engineered prompt entered does not provide “the answer” unethically. It is merely directed by the learner to provide a simplistic answer for an equally simplistic question. The real outrage is not the concern of cheating, the real outrage is that prompt engineering was used in such an underwhelming fashion instructionally.