Evaluation of pre-trained models for pedagogical assessment of novel AI-assisted educational questions

Automatic Bloom's taxonomy classification of assessment questions can substantially reduce instructor workload, but labeling is subjective and teacher-dependent. Prior machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches reported strong within-dataset results, yet were rarely evaluated in cross-dataset settings, leaving real-world generalizability unclear; meanwhile, LLM effectiveness for Bloom question classification has not been systematically studied. We evaluated the cross-dataset generalization of existing ML/DL methods and assessed LLMs with multiple prompting strategies on five datasets; the best prompting strategy combined in-context examples with course-specific action verbs. Supervised ML/DL models degraded substantially on unseen datasets, whereas LLMs were more stable, suggesting a robust alternative across diverse educational contexts. Based on the best prompting strategy, we also presented a lightweight UI that supports instructors in automatically classifying large question banks; a usability study indicated low workload and high usability.

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%).