Faculty resource · Strategy deck
AI Pedagogy Strategy Deck
Fourteen research-based strategies for designing assignments and activities where learning stays visible when students have AI. Tell us what you're trying to do and get a strategy you can try this week.
- Pick your goalWhat are you trying to do?
- Choose a questionThe one closest to your situation.
- Try today's version10–15 minutes, on one assignment.
What are you trying to do?
Which of these do you want?
What this deck is
Generative AI is changing how students engage with content, practice skills and receive feedback. What matters now is not whether students use AI, but how learning is structured so that understanding, reasoning and transfer actually develop.
These strategies draw on decades of learning science to use AI in ways that promote retrieval, explanation, comparison, feedback and reflection: the conditions under which durable learning happens. They are designed to work across disciplines, course formats and class sizes.
How to use it
- Treat the strategies as design lenses, not rules.
- Start with one existing assignment and apply one strategy.
- Choose the level of change that fits your time and context.
- Combine strategies where useful. They are designed to work together.
- Use the prompts to guide your redesign, or to work with AI as a drafting partner.
The goal is not to eliminate AI use, but to design assessments where learning remains visible, meaningful and defensible.
Three levels of change
Research foundation
The strategies draw on established learning sciences research on:
- Authentic and formative assessment
- Retrieval practice and durable learning
- Metacognition and self-regulated learning
- Transfer of learning across contexts
- Feedback, revision and improvement
- Expert–novice differences in reasoning
- Cognitive apprenticeship and coached practice
- Situated learning in realistic contexts
Key research traditions and scholars include Bransford et al., Chi, Dunlosky et al., Hattie, Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, and Schwartz & Bransford. Each strategy names the specific studies behind it under "Why it works."