arXiv:2608. 03952v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to provide conversational practice for English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners.
By Dongjie Yang, Siyan Lin, Leixian Shen, Rui Sheng, Huamin Qu, Zixin Chen
arXiv:2608.22993v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Students increasingly use LLMs as tutors for coursework and problem solving. Little is known about the level of assistance LLMs provide when students u...
By Suhyeon Lee, Juneha Baek, Jaehyeong Park, Donghyuk Shin
arXiv:2606. 01584v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conversational tutoring agents have been shown to improve learning engagement and student outcomes, and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in these systems to provide scalable, personalized feedback.
By Aitor Arronte Alvarez, Naiyi Xie Fincham
arXiv:2606. 11744v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are now widely used for everyday learning, but the underlying interactions are typically unstructured chats rather than following a curriculum.
By Sidney Tio, Arunesh Sinha, Pradeep Varakantham
arXiv:2607. 19371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based Socratic tutors increasingly guide students through multi-turn questioning, but they can suffer from scaffolding collapse: under sustained student pressure, a tutor gradually abandons guided inquiry and reveals solutions directly.
By Jing Shao, Qifeng Wu, Hanyu Zhang, Sixia Sun, Jun Zhuang
PEARL is a framework that trains Socratic tutoring agents using pedagogically aligned reinforcement learning. It introduces a controllable student simulator to model diverse cognitive states, a reward model that jointly evaluates pedagogical quality and correctness, and a stable multi‑objective RL approach to balance competing tutoring goals. Experiments demonstrate that PEARL competes with both open‑source tutoring systems and leading proprietary LLMs.
By Qikai Chang, Zhenrong Zhang, Linbo Chen, Pengfei Hu, Jianshu Zhang, Youhui Guo, Jun Du
The paper presents a tutoring platform that combines a generative AI chatbot with a reinforcement learning algorithm to adaptively sequence practice problems for students learning Python. In a five‑month field study across ten high schools, the adaptive sequencing improved unassisted final exam performance by 0.15 standard deviations, with mediation analysis indicating that higher engagement drove the gains. The study demonstrates that signals from student‑chatbot interactions can be leveraged to personalize and optimize learning at scale.
By Angel Tsai-Hsuan Chung, Botong Zhang, Ling-Chieh Kung, Hamsa Bastani, Osbert Bastani
EduDial is a large-scale multi-turn teacher‑student dialogue corpus covering 345 core knowledge points and 34,250 dialogue sessions, designed around Bloom’s taxonomy and ten questioning strategies such as situational, ZPD, and metacognitive questioning. The dataset includes differentiated teaching strategies for students at varying cognitive levels to provide targeted guidance. Using EduDial, the authors trained EduDial‑LLM 32B and introduced an 11‑dimensional evaluation framework that measures teaching quality and content quality, showing that most mainstream LLMs struggle with student‑centered teaching while EduDial‑LLM outperforms all baselines across all metrics.
By Shouang Wei, Min Zhang, Xin Lin, Bo Jiang, Zhongxiang Dai, Kun Kuang
The study analyzes 20,462 student turns from 1,260 sessions with a guided LLM chemistry tutor, identifying 6,630 impasse turns categorized as conceptual errors, expressed uncertainty, or help‑seeking. Three tutoring conditions—baseline, no‑direct‑answer, and guided—were simulated, revealing that the baseline tutor often gave direct answers, the no‑direct‑answer tutor always asked follow‑up questions, and the guided tutor varied its responses based on context. Impasse trajectories showed that each additional impasse turn reduced the likelihood of recovery, while addressing errors became increasingly beneficial compared to repeated scripted questioning.
By Bakhtawar Ahtisham, Kirk Vanacore, Alessandra Napoli, Josh Arens, Ksenia Ionova, Clayton Cohn, Shima Salehi, Rene Kizilcec
arXiv:2605.30051v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: A key part of developing large language model (LLM)-powered, automated tutoring tools is student simulation, i.e., using LLMs to role-play as stude...
By Zhangqi Duan, Shuyan Huang, Alexander Scarlatos, Jaewook Lee, Simon Woodhead, Andrew Lan
arXiv:2607. 22996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) deployed in educational settings often behave as direct answerers: they disclose target concepts in the opening turn instead of guiding students through progressive inquiry, as Socratic pedagogy prescribes.
By Xiaokun Wang, Siyu Song, Wentao Liu, Xiaodong Zou
arXiv:2607. 03303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide personalized support in learning, several studies have raised concerns regarding their use in education.
By Jerome Brender, Laila El-Hamamsy, Kim Uittenhove, Aitor Perez, Patrick Jermann, Francesco Mondada, Engin Bumbacher