arXiv AI
Oct 1

Examining Variation in How Guided AI Tutors Resolve Student Impasses

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 Computation and Language
Sep 24

SafeTutors: Benchmarking Pedagogical Safety in AI Tutoring Systems

SafeTutors is a benchmark designed to evaluate both safety and pedagogical effectiveness of AI tutoring systems across mathematics, physics, and chemistry. It introduces a risk taxonomy of 11 harm dimensions and 48 sub‑risks based on learning‑science literature, focusing on issues such as answer over‑disclosure, misconception reinforcement, and loss of scaffolding. The study finds that all tested models exhibit broad harms, that larger scale does not mitigate these issues, and that multi‑turn interactions significantly increase pedagogical failures from 17.7% to 77.8%.

By Rima Hazra, Bikram Ghuku, Ilona Marchenko, Yaroslava Tokarieva, Sayan Layek, Somnath Banerjee, Julia Stoyanovich, Mykola Pechenizkiy
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

EduDial: Constructing a Large-scale Multi-turn Teacher-Student Dialogue Corpus

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

LLM Pedagogical Behavior in AI Tutoring Interactions

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