Position in Module#
- Unit: 2
- Friday topic: From Structuring to Alignment: Clarifying Before Generating
- Literacy perspective: Interaction, secondarily Human-Context
- Collaboration level: Alignment
- Fundamentals connection: Generative AI Fundamentals
- Challenge type: Alignment by Clarification
This file is the detailed source of truth for the unit challenge. It specifies an evidence-based experiment that participants can transfer to their own professional, disciplinary, or organizational context.
Purpose and Demonstrated Mastery#
This challenge develops alignment before generation. Participants demonstrate that they can surface assumptions and success criteria before production and show whether clarification improves task fit.
Clarify in the submitted work:
- the collaboration move participants practice: Alignment
- the literacy perspective through which they manipulate, observe, and interpret AI behaviour: Interaction, secondarily Human-Context
- the generative or agentic AI fundamental that explains why the experiment matters: Generative AI Fundamentals
- the caveat or limitation participants should keep visible: context is limited and unevenly influential. As a session grows, earlier instructions, details, or constraints may lose practical weight or be displaced by newer context, so participants should not assume that something said once will reliably govern all later outputs.
Challenge Focus Logic#
- Difficulty: Direct generation fails when assumptions, constraints, audience needs, and success criteria remain implicit.
- Approach: Compare a direct-start baseline with an alignment-first variant, make clarification explicit before production, and build a reusable planning artefact that captures objective, audience, assumptions, constraints, success criteria, and control checks.
- Artefacts: protocol document; baseline interaction and output; alignment interaction evidence; planning artefact from the alignment phase; output produced from the aligned plan; comparative run log; concise conclusion on when clarification is worth the added step.
Assignment#
Choose a task, use case, document, decision process, or workflow from your own context that fits the unit focus. Define a baseline condition and a target condition that deliberately changes the relevant variable, workflow, responsibility logic, or design choice.
Before running the main comparison, predict what should change and why. Then produce an inspectable artefact, compare outcomes, and interpret whether the target condition improved control compared with the baseline.
Experimental Design#
Define before main execution:
- task/use case and intended output
- baseline configuration or approach
- target configuration, workflow, or intervention
- manipulated variable(s) or design change(s)
- what remains constant across comparison
- expected effects per manipulation/change
- evaluation criteria or conditions of satisfaction
- caveat to watch for: context is limited and unevenly influential. As a session grows, earlier instructions, details, or constraints may lose practical weight or be displaced by newer context, so participants should not assume that something said once will reliably govern all later outputs.
The manipulated variable(s) and evaluation criteria should follow from the relevant literacy lens:
- Interaction: request or exchange design
- Mechanism: settings, model behaviour, variability, or representation limits
- Data: grounding, source, retrieval, chunking, or bias conditions
- System: workflow, role, tool, state, or control-point design
- Human-Context: trust, responsibility, legitimacy, decision logic, acceptance, or accountability
Required Artefacts#
Required artefacts for this challenge:
- protocol document
- prediction table linking changes to expected effects
- primary artefact or output produced by the challenge
- run log comparing baseline versus target conditions
- selected evidence excerpts, screenshots, traces, retrieval results, judge reports, stakeholder feedback, capability maps, or workflow diagrams as appropriate for the unit
- concise interpretation plus one practical rule for similar tasks
Unit-specific artefact focus:
protocol document; baseline interaction and output; alignment interaction evidence; planning artefact from the alignment phase; output produced from the aligned plan; comparative run log; concise conclusion on when clarification is worth the added step.
Evidence and Observation#
Participants should capture evidence that makes the comparison inspectable.
Define:
- what should be observed: improved shared understanding and task fit
- what counts as evidence for the selected use case
- which qualitative or quantitative criteria should be used
- how uncertainty, failures, caveats, or unexpected results should be documented
Interpretation#
Participants should explain:
- whether the target condition improved control compared with the baseline
- what evidence supports that conclusion
- how the literacy perspective explains the observed difference
- how the relevant fundamental or caveat appeared in practice
- what practical rule they would carry into future work
Assessment Orientation#
Assess based on:
- meaningfulness of the baseline versus target comparison
- quality and coherence of protocol design
- credibility of variable/control isolation
- suitability of artefacts and evidence
- evidence-grounded interpretation and conceptual understanding
- explicit connection to the relevant literacy, collaboration level, and fundamental
- actionable final insight
Teacher-Configurable Options#
- exact submission format
- work mode: individual or group
- minimum scope: runs, materials, artefact depth, or workflow implementation
- environment constraints: shared tool or alternatives
- whether a workflow must be implemented or may be tightly specified
- optional extensions