LessonBench-V1: A Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating AI Lesson Generation Agents

The need to evaluate instructional materials for K-12 science education has become increasingly important, as more educators use generative AI to create instructional materials. However, the review of instructional materials is time-consuming, expertise-intensive, and difficult to scale, motivating interest in automated evaluation approaches. While large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on general evaluation tasks, their performance and reliability on instructional materials remain unclear. To address this gap, we formulate Automatic Instructional Materials Evaluation (AIME) as a generative AI task that predicts scores and evidence using the rubric designed by the educator. We create a benchmark dataset and develop baseline models for AIME. First, we curate the first AIME dataset, SciEval, consisting of instructional materials annotated with pedagogy-aligned evaluation scores and evidence-based rationales. Expert annotations achieve high inter-rater reliability, resulting in a dataset of 273 lesson-level instructional materials evaluated across 13 criteria (N=3549) using the EQuIP rubric. Second, we test mainstream LLMs (GPT, Gemini, Llama, and Qwen) on SciEval and find that none achieve strong performance. Then we fine-tune Qwen3 on SciEval. Results on a held-out test set show that domain-aligned fine-tuning can achieve up to 11 percent performance gains, highlighting the importance of domain-specific fine-tuning for AIME and facilitating the use of LLMs in other educational tasks.

AI agents can now solve problems, answer like subject experts, and generate long-form multimodal content. However, whether they can adapt a lesson to fit a specified learner, which education calls Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), has not been benchmarked. To measure it, we introduce the Teaching Monster Challenge, the first instructional video generation benchmark to treat the learner persona as an explicit evaluation criterion. Each system is given a topic and a learner persona and must generate a complete instructional video. Every video is screened by an LLM-judge, ranked by crowd pairwise voting, and finalized by an expert panel. The first edition shows that today's systems handle the content well but are far weaker at presenting it and adapting it to the learner. The same process exposes a limit of automatic judging. The LLM-judge separates a clear low-performing tail but ranks the strongest systems poorly. The strongest systems receive nearly identical scores from the judge, so its ranking of them does not match human preference. Progress therefore requires not only better teaching systems but also better automatic judges, and we release the benchmark, rubric, and human judgments as a testbed for both.

This work introduces AIriskEval-edu-db2, a new dataset designed to train and evaluate auditors based on LLMs for an explainable pedagogical risk assessment in instructional content for grades K-12. The dataset comprises 1,639 explanations from 170 curated ScienceQA questions, covering science, language arts, and social sciences. For each question, the dataset includes an explanation written by a human teacher alongside 11 explanations generated by LLM-simulated teacher profiles associated with distinct pedagogical risks. We propose a comprehensive risk rubric aligned with established educational standards that covers five complementary dimensions: factual precision, depth and completeness, focus and relevance, student-level appropriateness, and ideological bias. A key contribution is the addition of 785 explanations with structured explainability annotations, including risk localization and risk description. The annotations are produced through a semi-automatic process with expert teacher validation. Finally, we present validation experiments comparing state-of-the-art proprietary models with a lightweight local Llama 3.1 8B model in both the pedagogical risk detection and the explainability assessment. These experiments evaluate whether supervised fine-tuning on AIriskEval-edu-db2 enables a locally deployable model to approach or outperform stronger frontier models while preserving privacy in educational auditing and assessment tasks.