Does unrestricted AI access bypass the cognitive effort required for learning, or does it streamline knowledge acquisition? This paper reports on a study where we compare three designs for user-AI int...
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
CoLearn is an interactive, agentic tutoring system that learns about each learner through a persistent memory of mastery and misconceptions, updated with a Bayesian Knowledge Tracing model that uses a large language model as an observation function. It generates personalized questions targeting the learner’s weakest topics and recurring misconceptions, and provides a live evidence view for progress visualization and blind A/B comparison. In blind A/B tests, learners preferred questions conditioned on this memory 68‑69% of the time, and simulations show the agent’s belief converges toward the learner’s true mastery.
By Kailai He, Zhihao Wu, Linhai Zhang, Runcong Zhao, Yulan He, Jiazheng Li
arXiv:2602. 09907v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: College students increasingly use AI chatbots to support academic reading, yet we lack granular understanding of how these interactions shape their reading experience and cognitive engagement.
By Yue Fu, Joel Wester, Niels Van Berkel, Alexis Hiniker
arXiv:2609.28470v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Artificial intelligence offers an unprecedented opportunity to augment human capabilities, yet progress at the frontier has focused primarily on advanc...
By Curtis Northcutt, Inaara Hasmani, Kevin Feng, Trevor Khangi, Andreas Plesner, Jonas Mueller
arXiv:2602. 09907v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: College students increasingly use AI chatbots to support academic reading, yet we lack granular understanding of how these interactions shape their reading experience and cognitive engagement.
By Yue Fu, Joel Wester, Niels Van Berkel, Alexis Hiniker