Paper ID: 2407.12687

Towards Responsible Development of Generative AI for Education: An Evaluation-Driven Approach

Irina Jurenka, Markus Kunesch, Kevin R. McKee, Daniel Gillick, Shaojian Zhu, Sara Wiltberger, Shubham Milind Phal, Katherine Hermann, Daniel Kasenberg, Avishkar Bhoopchand, Ankit Anand, Miruna Pîslar, Stephanie Chan, Lisa Wang, Jennifer She, Parsa Mahmoudieh, Aliya Rysbek, Wei-Jen Ko, Andrea Huber, Brett Wiltshire, Gal Elidan, Roni Rabin, Jasmin Rubinovitz, Amit Pitaru, Mac McAllister, Julia Wilkowski, David Choi, Roee Engelberg, Lidan Hackmon, Adva Levin, Rachel Griffin, Michael Sears, Filip Bar, Mia Mesar, Mana Jabbour, Arslan Chaudhry, James Cohan, Sridhar Thiagarajan, Nir Levine, Ben Brown, Dilan Gorur, Svetlana Grant, Rachel Hashimshoni, Laura Weidinger, Jieru Hu, Dawn Chen, Kuba Dolecki, Canfer Akbulut, Maxwell Bileschi, Laura Culp, Wen-Xin Dong, Nahema Marchal, Kelsie Van Deman, Hema Bajaj Misra, Michael Duah, Moran Ambar, Avi Caciularu, Sandra Lefdal, Chris Summerfield, James An, Pierre-Alexandre Kamienny, Abhinit Mohdi, Theofilos Strinopoulous, Annie Hale, Wayne Anderson, Luis C. Cobo, Niv Efron, Muktha Ananda, Shakir Mohamed, Maureen Heymans, Zoubin Ghahramani, Yossi Matias, Ben Gomes, Lila Ibrahim

A major challenge facing the world is the provision of equitable and universal access to quality education. Recent advances in generative AI (gen AI) have created excitement about the potential of new technologies to offer a personal tutor for every learner and a teaching assistant for every teacher. The full extent of this dream, however, has not yet materialised. We argue that this is primarily due to the difficulties with verbalising pedagogical intuitions into gen AI prompts and the lack of good evaluation practices, reinforced by the challenges in defining excellent pedagogy. Here we present our work collaborating with learners and educators to translate high level principles from learning science into a pragmatic set of seven diverse educational benchmarks, spanning quantitative, qualitative, automatic and human evaluations; and to develop a new set of fine-tuning datasets to improve the pedagogical capabilities of Gemini, introducing LearnLM-Tutor. Our evaluations show that LearnLM-Tutor is consistently preferred over a prompt tuned Gemini by educators and learners on a number of pedagogical dimensions. We hope that this work can serve as a first step towards developing a comprehensive educational evaluation framework, and that this can enable rapid progress within the AI and EdTech communities towards maximising the positive impact of gen AI in education.

Submitted: May 21, 2024