How to Use AI for Studying Without Skipping the Learning

A chatbot will give you an answer to almost any question on your course in seconds. The risk is that it does the part of the work that was meant to teach you something. This post covers how to use AI so that you still do that part, what to check in its answers, and some prompts you can copy.

Getting answers vs getting help

For example, you might be three lines into question four of an engineering maths problem sheet when you reach an integral you don't recognise. You could:

1. paste the question into a chatbot and read the worked solution, or
2. ask which method applies to an integral of that form, get the name of the substitution, then go back and finish the question yourself.

Both get you to the answer. Only the second gives you practice at getting there on your own, which is what the exam will ask of you.

Following someone else's working can feel like understanding, but that feeling is a poor guide. In experiments by Roediger and Karpicke (2006), students who reread a passage were more confident about remembering it, yet a week later they remembered less than students who had practised recalling it. A review of ten study techniques by Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) rated practice testing as one of only two with high utility.

Good ways to use AI for studying

1. Ask it to quiz you. Ask for five questions on a topic, one at a time, and tell it not to give the answer until you reply. Answer from memory with your notes closed. Ask it to say what was wrong with your answer before it gives the right one, because once the right answer is on screen, the recall part is over.
2. Ask for an explanation, then write it yourself. Read the explanation once, close it, and write the idea out in your own words. Then compare. Whatever you left out is what you still need to learn. This is the idea behind the Feynman technique.
3. Ask it where to look. Ask which part of your textbook or notes covers the idea, and what the idea is called. That sends you back to your own study material with a better question. It only works if the chatbot can see those pages, which is the first point below.

What to check when you use a chatbot

Where the answer came from. If you haven't given it your pages, it isn't answering from them. Its answer may use different notation, a broader definition or a different emphasis from what you're studying. Even when you have given it the pages, check any quote, number or page reference against the original before you learn it. OpenAI's own help page lists made-up quotes and citations among the mistakes ChatGPT can make, and says to verify them.

What you've got wrong. Some chatbots can now remember earlier conversations, depending on your settings. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all have a memory setting. Either way, keep your own list of the questions you got wrong and when. Don't rely on your sense of what you know: in the Roediger and Karpicke study above, the students who were most confident remembered the least a week later.

In SymbioLearn, quiz questions are written only from the Sources you add. A question that can't name the passage it came from is dropped, each correction shows the Source and the page, and Mistakes keeps the questions you got wrong.

Other things AI is useful for

Some study tasks have no learning in them to skip, and using a chatbot for them is fine:

• A second explanation of something you only heard once. Different wording sometimes helps.
• Questions you'd rather not ask in a seminar.
• Rewriting a dense paragraph in plainer language so you can find the main point.
• Practice questions when you don't have any.
• Checking an explanation you've already written. Ask what's missing. You did the recall first, so the order is right.
• Planning your week once you know which topics need the most work.

Two rules apply to all of it:

1. Check facts against your own study material, especially numbers, dates, definitions and anything you plan to memorise.
2. If the work is assessed, follow your institution's rules on AI. They decide what help is allowed.

A quick check before you ask

Before you send a prompt, ask what you'll be able to do afterwards that you can't do now.

If the answer is "I'll know the answer to this one question", change the prompt. Ask about the method instead of the answer, ask to be tested instead of told, or ask which step of your own working went wrong.

Prompts you can copy

Paste a section of your own notes or textbook under each one.

• To be quizzed: "Using only the text below, ask me one question at a time. Don't show the answer until I reply. When I reply, tell me what was wrong with my answer first, then give the correct answer and quote the sentence from the text that supports it."
• When you're stuck: "Here is my working so far. Don't solve it. Tell me which step is wrong, or give me a hint for the next step only."
• To check an explanation: "Here is my explanation of [topic]. What is missing or wrong? Don't rewrite it for me."

When it quotes your text, check that the sentence is really there.

What to do next

1. Next time you're stuck on a question, ask for a hint at the exact step where you stopped, then finish it yourself.
2. This week, use the quiz prompt on one topic you've already covered, and write down anything you get wrong.

If you'd like quiz questions written from your own study material, with the page behind every answer, add it to a Module in SymbioLearn.