The need to identify methods to support self-regulated learning has raised the interest of researchers in recent years. Cognitive prompts are considered very promising instructional tools for developing self-regulatory abilities. The present study aims to investigate the usefulness of several types of cognitive prompts in activating learning strategies for studying an educationally relevant content by psychology students. Two empirical investigations were conducted in a realistic learning environment to test an instructional strategy which integrates cognitive prompts. The first experiment tested the effectiveness of prompts to stimulate deep and shallow processing, measuring immediate learning effects. The second experiment focused on long-term effects of the strategy. The findings indicate that prompts activating deep learning strategies resulted in a slightly improvement in students' performance, but this enhancing effect diminished over time. Cognitive prompts encouraging a deep learning approach can support the comprehension of complex content in a psychology course. Future research is suggested to identify conditions that facilitate long-lasting learning effects. Cognitive prompts may be an effective method for teaching psychology to support students' efforts to understand a complex content. For enhancing the long-term impact of the method, teachers should explore other learning strategies.