When AI Meets Early Childhood Education: Large Language Models as Assessment Teammates in Chinese Preschools

Classroom observations are widely recognized as a key tool for establishing benchmarks of education quality and guiding pedagogical improvement, yet they remain resource-intensive and dependent on trained observers. This study evaluated the feasibility of using a LLM (GPT-5 model) to score teacher-child interactions in early childhood classrooms, benchmarked against human raters. The study analyzed 87 video-recorded observations from 38 classrooms across 30 kindergartens in Hong Kong. Using observation transcripts, the AI model was configured to apply the full Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) framework. AI-rated scores were then compared with human ratings by examining correlations and differences in mean scores of the CLASS domains and dimensions. The results showed greater convergence between AI and raters for the Emotional Support domain and, in particular, the Quality of Feedback dimension, which captures how teachers use feedback to extend children's learning. Greater divergence emerged for interactions that were more procedural or context-dependent, particularly within the Classroom Organization and Instructional Support domains. These findings suggest that transcript-based AI scoring may capture some of the relative variation in teacher-child interactions but cannot yet reproduce calibrated human judgements consistently across the full CLASS framework. AI-assisted observation may therefore be more appropriate as a preliminary screening tool rather than as a replacement for trained observers, providing teachers with evidence for reflection rather than high-stakes evaluation. Future research should examine whether domain-specific training and incorporation of contextual and visual information can improve alignment between AI and human rated scores.

Generative AI increasingly supports educational design tasks, e.g., through Large Language Models (LLMs), demonstrating the capability to design assessment questions that are aligned with pedagogical frameworks (e.g., Bloom's taxonomy). However, they often rely on subjective or limited evaluation methods; focus primarily on proprietary models; or rarely systematically examine generation, evaluation, or deployment constraints in real educational settings. Meanwhile, Small Language Models (SLMs) have emerged as local alternatives that better address privacy and resource limitations; yet their effectiveness for assessment tasks remains underexplored. To address this gap, we systematically compare LLMs and SLMs for assessment question design; evaluate generation quality across Bloom's taxonomy levels using reproducible, pedagogically grounded metrics; and further assess model-based judging against expert-informed evaluation by analyzing reliability and agreement patterns. Results show that SLMs achieve competitive performance across key pedagogically motivated quality dimensions while enabling local, privacy-sensitive deployment. However, model-based evaluations also exhibit systematic inconsistencies and bias relative to expert ratings. These findings provide evidence to posit language models as bounded assistants in assessment workflows; underscore the necessity of Human-in-the-Loop; and advance the automated educational question generation field by examining quality, reliability, and deployment-aware trade-offs.

The rapid integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into K-12 and higher education has outpaced the development of reliable methods for evaluating their pedagogical quality. As the research community starts to explore the space of automating evaluation of AI tutors, we introduce FATE (FLC AI Tutor Evaluator), a specialized 8B-parameter language model designed to evaluate AI tutors. Aligned with the four core evaluation tracks from the BEA 2025 Shared Task, our model assesses pedagogical ability across Mistake Identification, Mistake Location, Guidance, and Actionability. Because pedagogical evaluation is a specialized task with limited labeled data, we leverage knowledge distillation from a frontier LLM to generate additional supervision, yielding absolute performance gains up to 22.63 percentage points. Finally, we demonstrate FATE's utility as an automated evaluator by benchmarking instructional responses generated by popular commercial models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek. On average, we have found that Gemini 2.5 Flash perfomed best (82.88%), then ChatGPT 5.5 Instant (80.75%), followed by DeepSeek V4 Flash (80.13%) and Claude Sonnet 4.6 (74.00%).