Capture-Calibrate-Coach: A Graph-Based Framework for Knowledge Monitoring Estimation and Adaptive Feedback

Educational interventions are effective tools for enhancing student learning. While Large Language Models (LLMs) allow for generating adaptive feedback at scale, current studies lack clear methodologies for providing Just-in-Time (JiT) feedback in authentic instructional settings. In this paper, we present a framework that provides adaptive feedback by grounding LLMs with domain-specific expert knowledge. Our approach collects written reasoning logic (strategy essays) from students, analyzes potential error types based on the content of that reasoning, and delivers non-intrusive feedback designed to clarify missing or incorrect concepts. We deploy this framework in a large-scale university course (N > 1000), where it improved student performance by over 80% compared to previous semesters. Lastly, we validate the framework's pedagogical utility by analyzing the learning trajectories; we demonstrate how iterative conversations with LLM facilitate shifting one's misconception to correct understanding.

Metacognition-the ability to monitor one's own knowledge state, spot gaps, and autonomously fill them--remains largely absent from modern AI. Here, we present MetaKGEnrich, a fully automated pipeline that endows large language model (LLM) applications with self-directed knowledge repair. The system (i) builds knowledge graphs from a seed query, (ii) detects sparse regions via seven graph metrics, (iii) has GPT-4o generate targeted questions, (iv) retrieves web evidence with Tavily and ingests it into Neo4j, and (v) re-answers the query with GraphRAG for GPT-4 to evaluate improvement. Tested on 30 queries from each of three widely-used datasets: Google Research Natural Questions, MS MARCO, and Hot-potQA. MetaKGEnrich improved answer quality in 80% of HotpotQA questions, 87% of Google Research Natural Questions and 83% of MS MARCO questions, while preserving well-supported regions. This proof of concept demonstrates how topological self-diagnosis plus targeted retrieval can advance AI toward humanlike metacognitive learning.

Metacognition is a critical component of intelligence that describes the ability to monitor and regulate one's own cognitive processes. Yet LLMs exhibit systemic deficiencies in key metacognitive faculties: they hallucinate with high confidence, fail to recognize knowledge boundaries, and misrepresent their internal uncertainty--undermining trustworthiness and reliability. Since monitoring task performance and adapting behavior accordingly are central to metacognition, we posit that models capable of accurately judging their own performance are better positioned to improve it. We operationalize this idea via two novel mechanisms: reinforcement learning with metacognitive feedback (RLMF), a paradigm to refine completion rankings during preference optimization based on the quality of a model's self-judgments of performance, and metacognitive data selection, which uses similar self-judgments to identify high-value training examples, outperforming naive active learning. We apply these innovations to the problem of faithful calibration (FC), a task that is itself fundamentally metacognitive: the goal is to align expressed with intrinsic uncertainty, difficult even for frontier LLMs. We adopt a two-stage, decoupled approach, first using these methods to calibrate the faithfulness of models' self-reported confidence scores, then mapping to natural, context-adaptable linguistic uncertainty via targeted output editing. Extensive experiments show RLMF achieves generalizable, state-of-the-art FC on diverse tasks while preserving accuracy. Further, RLMF surpasses standard RL by up to 63% while enhancing models' ability to assess and express their own capability limits. This positions RLMF as a promising paradigm to enhance LLM metacognition toward improved abilities and alignment, and suggests metacognitive performance as an effective RL signal to overcome limits of prior intrinsic feedback methods.