The paper introduces Universal Textual Teaching (UTT), a parameter‑update‑free framework that distills knowledge gaps between a Teacher and Student large language model into a reusable natural‑language artifact called a Primer. UTT identifies representative gap cases, then iteratively refines the Primer through a cycle of student attempts, prompter‑generated teaching instructions, teacher demonstrations, and synthesizer consolidation. Experiments on math (Omni‑MATH‑2) and code generation (KernelBench) show significant accuracy gains, outperforming prompt engineering and parameter‑based knowledge distillation, and the Primer generalizes across different Teacher‑Student pairs.
By Zhanyi Lu, Huan Wang
SMRC is a new method that aligns large language models with student reasoning for mathematical error correction. It treats student reasoning as a multi‑step decision problem and uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to find optimal correction paths, while a breadth‑first search guided by the model generates reward signals that are back‑propagated to supervise intermediate steps. The authors also introduce the MSEB benchmark of 158 high‑school math problems and a dual evaluation protocol focusing on solution accuracy and correct‑step retention, showing that SMRC outperforms existing methods on several datasets.
By Biaojie Zeng, Min Zhang, Juan Zhou, Fengrui Liu, Ruiyang Huang, Yu Song, Xin Lin
Stepwise-Querying is a method that extracts step-by-step explanations from a black-box teacher model without needing its internal chain-of-thought. By independently querying the teacher for intermediate derivations, validity checks, and corrections for each step, the gathered explanations are used to fine-tune smaller student models. Experiments on mathematics and code benchmarks show that this approach outperforms three baselines in 14 of 16 comparisons, and the introduced Stepwise Explanation Information Gain metric helps diagnose the usefulness of intermediate reasoning.
By Dicong Yu, Wenhua Wang, Tian Wang
arXiv:2607. 13103v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to predict students' future performance by modeling their evolving knowledge states from historical interactions.
By Duantengchuan Li, Yingqian Bi, Jinsong Chen, Rui Zhang, Mingwen Tong
arXiv:2608.21668v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate students at different mastery levels. These simulations can generate synthetic training...
By Yuan An, Emily Wang, Benjamin Wang, Ruhma Hashmi
The paper introduces an interpretable, difficulty-aware knowledge tracing framework for tutor‑student dialogues that leverages large language models. It explicitly models student ability and question difficulty at each turn, using the original question text and the next tutor‑posed task to estimate knowledge state. By integrating Item Response Theory, the framework translates LLM outputs into cognitive‑theory‑based parameters, achieving superior performance over existing baselines while producing interpretable predictions.
By Shuyan Huang, Alexander Scarlatos, Jaewook Lee, Andrew Lan
arXiv:2609.01591v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: AI tutors are most useful when they adapt to each student's strengths, weaknesses, and preferred guidance, but evidence about which guidance works for...
By Ke Yang, Chenglong Wang, Michel Galley, Chandan Singh, Jeevana Priya Inala, ChengXiang Zhai, Jianfeng Gao
The paper presents ESSE, a self‑explanation tutor that uses a large language model to give immediate feedback on students’ line‑by‑line explanations of introductory programming worked examples. It evaluates the LLM’s judgments against a domain expert and a crowd of non‑experts, finding that the model is reliable enough to serve as the tutor’s assessment engine. In an introductory Java course, the tutor’s feedback encourages students to persist, improves the completeness and conceptual depth of their explanations, and shows evidence of learning.
By Arun-Balajiee Lekshmi-Narayanan, Mohammad Hassany, Kamil Akhuseyinoglu, Rully Hendrawan, Peter Brusilovsky
arXiv:2610.35609v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Modeling the latent, multi-step reasoning processes of learners is a core challenge for adaptive tutoring systems, which often rely on simple right/w...
By Trystan Geoffre, Zheng Yuan, Thierry Geoffre
arXiv:2607. 22629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) produce long, explicit chains of intermediate steps before generating a final answer at inference time.
By Durgesh Kalwar, Vardhan Palod, Subbarao Kambhampati
arXiv:2610.27450v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) can succeed with surprisingly few training questions, motivating a view of questions as carriers of distributional knowled...
By Jiashuo Sun, Hao Zhang, Xueqiang Xu, Heng Wang, Yixuan Xie, Pengcheng Jiang, Zhenrui Yue, Jiajun Fan, Peiran Li, Ge Liu, Shaowen Wang, Jiawei Han
The paper introduces Practical Integrated Cross-consistent Knowledge Tracing (PICKT), a model that incorporates multiple feature types to improve Knowledge Tracing robustness when new questions lack interaction history. It evaluates the impact of difficulty, textual, and knowledge‑map relational features, finding that difficulty is especially informative for hard questions, while fused text and map features help estimate unseen questions by leveraging similar ones seen during training. The study concludes that prioritizing feature annotation aligned with educational service characteristics is essential for maintaining robust diagnostics in Intelligent Tutoring Systems.
By Wonbeen Lee, Channyoung Lee, Junho Sohn, Hansam Cho