Resource
Student Guide to AI
The Student Guide to Artificial Intelligence is a free publication series from Elon University's Imagining the Digital Future Center, the American Association of Colleges and Universities and, since 2026, The Princeton Review. Three editions build on each other: an introduction to AI tools for college students in 2024, practical guidance on skills, ethics, academic integrity and careers in 2025, and in 2026 Human Wisdom for the Age of AI, a field guide that turns away from tool instruction toward the human capacities that AI literacy is often reduced to.
What you can do with it
The 2026 field guide works through ten capacities — curiosity, critical thinking, focused and deep thinking, creativity, emotional and social intelligence, communications, wisdom, ethics, adaptability and self identity — each set against a thinker from the past, plus a bonus module on contemporary scholars. Every capacity has a companion teacher's guide module with lesson suggestions, worksheets and discussion questions, downloadable individually or as one combined PDF, and usable in any order. The series also ships a scenario-based Human Wisdom Self-Assessment: anonymous, no right or wrong answers, with options ordered along a continuum from relying on AI immediately through working with it as a co-pilot to leading with your own judgment. Its authors position it as a formative diagnostic to run before reading the guide and discuss rather than a test.
Who it is for
Undergraduates in any discipline, and upper secondary students. Faculty, academic support staff, librarians and student affairs educators get the module set and the discussion prompts; the guide is deliberately discipline-neutral, which is why institutions use it for first-year seminars, faculty development and shared vocabulary across separate AI initiatives.
Notes and caveats
The guide is formatively framed and says so: scores are a snapshot of habits, not a grade, a trait or a prediction, and students are told not to share them publicly.
The framing around AI rests on cited survey and experimental evidence that outsourcing effort can leave students retaining less — which is the offloading question the guide is written to counter, not to settle. The field guide PDF sits behind a short form asking name, role, institution and email; the teacher's guide modules and the pedagogical framework paper download directly. The interactive version runs in Gemini Notebook and needs a Google account. Publisher figures of more than 40,000 PDF downloads across about 4,000 institutions in 180 countries, and over 130 custom campus editions, are theirs, as are the endorsements from ALA, NASPA, EDUCAUSE, OLC, CAA, the Gardner Institute and RTI International.