Prompt Engineering for Knowledge Creation: Using Chain-of-Thought to Support Students’ Improvable Ideas

Knowledge creation in education is a critical practice for advancing collective knowledge and fostering innovation within a student community. Students play vital roles in identifying gaps and collaborative work to improve community ideas from discourse, but idea quality can be suboptimal, affected by a lack of resources or diversity of ideas. The use of generative Artificial Intelligence and large language models (LLMs) in education has allowed work on idea-centric discussions to advance in ways that were previously unfeasible. However, the use of LLMs requires specific skill sets in prompt engineering, relevant to the in-context technique known as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) for generating and supporting improvable ideas in student discourse. A total of 721 discourse turns consisting of 272 relevant question–answer pairs and 149 threads of student discourse data were collected from 31 students during a two-day student Knowledge Building Design Studio (sKBDS). Student responses were augmented using the CoT approach and the LLM-generated responses were compared with students’ original responses. Findings are illustrated using two threads to show that CoT-augmented inputs for the LLMs can generate responses that support improvable ideas in the context of knowledge creation. This study presents work from authentic student discourse and has implications for research and classroom practice.