AI in Education

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14 papers in the last four weeks, up 27% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 172

Aug 9, 2026cs.AI

Findings of the First Teaching Monster Challenge: A Benchmark of Pedagogical Content Knowledge in AI Agents

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.

Yi-Cheng Lin, Yu-Kai Guo, Szu-Chi Chen +15

National Taiwan University · NTU AI Center of Research Excellence

AI in Education AI Agent Evaluation Video Generation

Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

The Capability Ladder: A Curriculum-Modernization Framework for Workforce Readiness in the AI Era

Artificial intelligence is changing the task composition of computing work faster than curricula and training typically adapt. This is a curriculum-framework paper, grounded in a structured narrative review of labor-market and software-engineering evidence and illustrated through an exploratory pilot course: the review supports the framework, and the pilot illustrates it rather than serving as primary evidence. The central claim is that near-term change is task reallocation rather than full replacement: routine implementation is increasingly automated while verification, systems thinking, security, and the ability to supervise and orchestrate AI (keeping a human in the loop) gain value. We organize the response as a capability-assurance framework anchored by a Capability Ladder: a five-level progression (trigger, automation, workflow, AI agent, agent team) that classifies the operational autonomy of AI-augmented work and the human supervision it requires. We map the ladder to course-level updates, workload-aware assessment, and stackable workforce credentials, and illustrate it through a two-semester pilot of a team-based, no-code course enrolling computing and business students. We argue for targeted modernization around durable capabilities rather than wholesale curriculum replacement, and we are explicit about evidence limits: labor signals are confounded by non-AI forces, industry reports are directional, and the pilot is exploratory.

Majid Memari, George Rudolph

Department of Computer Science, Utah Valley University, Orem, UT 84058, USA

Computer Science Education AI in Education Agentic Workflows Human-in-the-Loop AI AI and Labor

Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

Curriculum as Code: An AI-Assisted Architecture for Instructional Design in STEM Education

Contribution: This paper presents a six-phase AI-assisted instructional design architecture based on the Curriculum as Code paradigm, integrating Generative AI with LaTeX and Python to automate the creation of reproducible, visually consistent, and technically precise materials for STEM education. Background: Creating customized instructional materials for active learning imposes a heavy workload on faculty. Standard presentation tools lack robust support for technical content, while current AI applications often hallucinate and fail to formalize the instructional authoring process, limiting their utility for rigorous academic design. Intended Outcomes: The framework aims to reduce preparation time while ensuring mathematical accuracy, adherence to institutional visual identity, and preservation of the instructor's tacit pedagogical knowledge through explicit rules. Application Design: The solution comprises a six-phase pipeline that replaces ad-hoc prompt engineering with a systematic workflow, utilizing text-based interfaces and code-driven generation (LaTeX/Beamer for slides, Python for figures), governed by pedagogical constraints, contextual calibrations, and automated review cycles. Findings: Validated over one year across 8 modules and 28 project contexts in a Project-Based Learning environment, the architecture significantly reduced instructor workload. Generated assets underwent independent peer review and were deployed by six different faculty members, confirming scalability beyond a single author. Based on over 600 voluntary student evaluations, materials achieved high quality ratings from 8.5 to 9.9/10. Results indicate high reproducibility, minimized hallucinations, and sustained pedagogical and visual fidelity, suggesting viability for broad STEM educational applications.

Henrique Mohallem Paiva

Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo (Unifesp), Rua Talim, 330, Sao Jose dos Campos (SP), Brazil, 12231-280 · Institute of Technology and Leadership (Inteli), Av. Prof. Almeida Prado, 520, Sao Paulo (SP), Brazil, 05508-901

Educational Technology AI in Education Generative AI in Education

Aug 5, 2026cs.AI

AI Literacy for Legal Translation: Developing Digital Resilience

Generative AI is transforming legal translation by introducing opportunities alongside linguistic, technical, legal, ethical and cognitive risks. This chapter examines the implications of AI for professional legal translation and proposes an AI literacy framework tailored to the profession. It argues that AI does not change the fundamental objectives of legal translation but requires an extension of professional competence through AI literacy. The proposed framework comprises four mutually reinforcing dimensions, foundational, procedural, critical and strategic, and conceptualises AI literacy as a transversal component of legal translation competence that fosters digital resilience. It further discusses the pedagogical implications of this framework by proposing classroom activities designed to develop AI literacy in legal translator education, enabling future translators to integrate AI critically, responsibly and in accordance with professional standards.

Łucja Biel

University of Warsaw

AI in Education AI Literacy

Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

TACT: Taxonomy-Aligned Post-Training for Pedagogically Adaptive English Tutoring

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to provide conversational practice for English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners. Effective ESL tutoring, however, requires more than fluent response generation: a tutor must select an appropriate pedagogical action based on learner behavior and dialogue context. Human-tutoring research offers principles for adaptive support, but they are often task-specific and remain insufficiently integrated into LLM-based ESL tutor training and evaluation. We present TACT (Taxonomy-Aligned Conversational Tutor), a human-grounded framework for post-training and evaluating pedagogically adaptive ESL tutors. Drawing on established literature, we develop two complementary taxonomies: the Tutor-Strategy Taxonomy with 13 tutor response strategies and the Student-Move Taxonomy characterizing learner behavior by move type and status. Using these taxonomies, we construct TACTCorpus, which enriches 260 authentic teacher-student conversations with 32,379 annotations and quality-controlled augmented training data. We then post-train Qwen3.5-4B through supervised fine-tuning followed by taxonomy-aligned Group Relative Policy Optimization, producing TACTutor and optimizing it for scaffolding quality rather than reference imitation alone. On TACTBench, a strategy-balanced diagnostic benchmark comprising 78 authentic tutoring contexts, TACTutor improves over its backbone by 20.30% and outperforms all evaluated proprietary baselines under the same protocol, while maintaining backbone performance on established external educational benchmarks; in a blinded study with 50 learners, it also receives the highest overall mean rating among the evaluated tutors. We release the data, benchmark, and model weights, providing an open foundation for developing pedagogically adaptive ESL tutors.

Dongjie Yang, Siyan Lin, Leixian Shen +3

Intelligent Tutoring Systems AI in Education Language Model Post-Training

Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

Policy Fragmentation or Institutional Alignment? Institutional Governance of AI in Universities and Business Schools

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming high-skilled domains, requiring higher education institutions (HEI) to balance the teaching of foundational principles with the integration of emerging tools to ensure workforce readiness. While HEI are increasingly adopting AI, many continue to grapple with how it should be incorporated into curricula and governed through policy, especially when such policies are set at different levels of an institution. This research analyzes AI policies across HEI from 34 states in the United States to investigate what these policies entail and how policies set across institutions as well as within different levels at an institution differ. Using natural language processing (NLP) to analyze institutional AI policies, we find a clear divergence: university-level policies emphasize data security and risk mitigation whereas school-level policies, when present, focus on pedagogical applications and tool usage. When focusing on business school specific policies, relatively few business schools maintain AI policies distinct from university frameworks, creating misalignment with discipline-specific learning objectives. This gap poses challenges particularly for faculty and students as well as for accreditation purposes. Our insights suggest that guidelines should be aligned with broader institutional policies while addressing discipline-specific learning objectives and evolving workforce demands.

Lydia Manikonda, Dominique Outlaw

Lally School of Management Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, NY 12180 · Department of Finance Frank G. Zarb School of Business 148 Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11549

AI in Education AI Governance

Aug 4, 2026cs.CY

EduClaw-Bench: A Long-Horizon Benchmark for Pedagogical LLM Agents with Simulated Learners

Large language models (LLMs) power educational applications from tutoring to essay scoring, but each is a point solution to a single task, and only recently have these point solutions been integrated into agents operating over a learning management system (LMS). Yet tutoring is long-horizon, since a learner improves over days and weeks rather than in a single turn, and no benchmark evaluates an agent tutor across a sustained relationship. We introduce EduClaw-Bench, a benchmark that places an agent tutor in a continuous 30-day relationship with a simulated learner grounded in knowledge tracing (KT), whose knowledge-concept mastery, from a KT model trained on real-student data, drives its answers and is probed for learning gain across 55 scenarios. Each agent is scored on three primary axes (learning gain, responsiveness, and helpfulness) and two curriculum-design axes (Gagné and Rosenshine), with helpfulness and the curriculum axes judged by a cross-family panel of three LLM judges. Evaluating 10 agent adapters over three base-model tiers yields two findings that single-tier, single-session evaluation cannot reach. First, tutoring quality belongs to the base model and the agent harness together rather than either alone. Second, almost no combination sustains good tutoring over the full horizon. A calibration check (

\text{ECE}=0.049

) and a live-classroom field study confirm that the simulated learner and its measurements track reality. Our work is a step toward trustworthy AI tutors for future education.

Unggi Lee, Sookbun Lee, Yeil Jeong +3

Korea University Sejong Campus · Opentutorials · Indiana University +2

Intelligent Tutoring Systems AI in Education LLM Agent Evaluation Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks

Aug 3, 2026eess.SY

Bridging Artificial Intelligence and Power Systems Education Using a Hands-On Executable Framework

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly central to power and energy systems, supporting modeling, forecasting, optimization, and control. Yet most existing works emphasize specialized applications and offer little reusable material for newcomers or interdisciplinary learners, who increasingly rely on large language models rather than building their own. This gap points to a need for engineering-grounded AI (EGAI), in which AI workflows follow established engineering and power-system domain rules rather than acting as task-agnostic black boxes. Motivated by a community survey of researchers and practitioners, which shows 92% report at least one barrier before running an AI model and 94% want a power-specific hands-on course. This paper presents a framework consisting of open, executable module library that lowers the entry barrier for AI in power systems. The modules follow a progressive difficulty ladder that maps core AI concepts onto representative power-system tasks: (i) foundational deep neural network (DNN) templates for function approximation and load-curve fitting; (ii) a domain-coupled convolutional neural network (CNN) power-flow surrogate for a 5-bus system; and (iii) frontier modules on DNN-assisted optimization, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for battery storage control, and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for the swing equation. All modules are released as Jupyter notebooks that run locally or on Google Colab and are delivered through an IEEE online course and IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) webinar series. The webinar drew more than 590 live attendees, which is among the ten most-attended IEEE PES webinars, and over 344 repository visits within two weeks, reinforcing the survey-based motivation.

Junjie Yin, Buxin She, Xinyu Feng +2

Fran · EECS Department and the CURENT research center at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996 · ECE Department at Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506

AI in Education Power Systems

Aug 3, 2026cs.CL

PredAct-Bench: Benchmarking Tool-Augmented Dialogue under Controlled Tool Noise

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in task-oriented dialogue systems that support multi-step decision-making in high-stakes domains such as education, healthcare, and finance. However, existing benchmarks typically assume perfectly accurate tool outputs, overlooking the reality that deployed systems must operate with noisy tools and human decision-makers whose trust in the agent is itself uncertain. Such conditions are common in practice, for example, a clinician using a diagnostic prediction tool or an advisor relying on a model that forecasts student outcomes from historical records. We introduce PREDACTBENCH, a benchmark for evaluating dialogue agents paired with statistically imperfect tools, using education as a measurable testbed where ground truth outcomes and clear intervention decisions are available. First, we build a benchmark for AI-assisted human decision-making, where the AI uses noisy predictors to help guide a user. Second, we introduce episode-level Relative AI-Reliance (RAIR) and Relative self-reliance (RSR) metrics, extending prior trust calibration framework to multi-turn dialogue. Third, we evaluate 13 state-of-the-art closed and open source LLMs on two educational datasets, OULAD (real assessment trajectories from the UK Open University) and PREDACT-CS (60 courses with real final grade outcomes and synthetically generated weekly score trajectories), alongside a human study with instructors and teaching assistants. We find that when tools are noisy, SOTA models are supposed to provide visibility to teachers so that they do not over-rely on wrong suggestions or hallucinations, but current models fail to do that. We offer PREDACTBENCH to help build better LLMs as AI decision support systems to help teachers.

Abdulrahman AlRabah, Xiaocheng Yang, Dilek Hakkani-Tür +1

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

AI Agent Reliability AI-Assisted Decision Making Tool-Augmented Language Model Agents AI in Education AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Tool Use+1

Aug 3, 2026cs.CY

Rethinking Generative AI Literacy: An Integrative, Developmental, and Dialectical Framework for K-12 Teacher Education

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has entered classrooms faster than teachers have been prepared to use it well, producing a GenAI literacy lag in which technological diffusion outpaces educators' conceptual, pedagogical, and ethical readiness. Established AI literacy frameworks predate the widespread adoption of large language models and, while acknowledging ethics, position it as a discrete competency rather than a constitutive commitment, with equity and agency as supplementary design principles. Recent GenAI-specific efforts address isolated features but remain fragmented. We introduce the Responsible AI Literacy in Education (RAIL-Ed) framework, developed through a systematic review and qualitative framework analysis of 67 studies (2023-2025), grounded in critical, pragmatist, sociocultural, and human-centered traditions (Freire, Dewey, Vygotsky, Shneiderman). RAIL-Ed specifies six interdependent pillars: Technical Fluency, Critical Evaluation, Human-AI Collaboration, Contextual Awareness, Ethical Reasoning, and Empowered Agency, marked by three commitments. It is integrative: the absence of any pillar produces a characteristic pedagogical failure. It is developmental: a three-level rubric (Emerging, Competent, Advanced) specifies how each pillar matures across the K-12 teacher-preparation continuum. It is dialectical: the same generative affordance can deepen or displace learning depending on the literacy a teacher brings to it, making the cultivation of that literacy, not the adoption of the tool, the object of design. By treating ethics, equity, and agency as constitutive, RAIL-Ed offers a theoretically grounded basis for curriculum design, teacher education, and policy, aligned with the UNESCO AI Competency Framework for Teachers and the OECD/European Commission AILit Framework. The framework is conceptual, advancing falsifiable propositions for empirical validation.

Shahin Hossain, Sima Ahmadi, Leqi Li +7

School of Education, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland, USA · School of Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum Studies: Educational Technology Department, Kent State University, Ohio, USA · Department of Learning and Performance Systems, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA +6

AI in Education AI Literacy Generative AI in Education Responsible AI

Aug 2, 2026cs.AI

Towards Sustainable Learning in Online Education: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

Online education offers unprecedented scalability and accessibility to global learners from diverse backgrounds, but it often suffers from low engagement and poor long term learning effectiveness. To address these challenges, we introduce AI Tutor, a reinforcement learning based model designed to promote sustainable learning by optimizing both short and longterm learning outcomes. In the short term, AI-Tutor draws on cognitive theory to guide learners through a balance of acquiring new knowledge and reinforcing prior learning. In the long term, it models learner engagement to inform strategies that sustain motivation and reduce dropout. These enhancements enable AI-Tutor to provide personalized guidance that fosters both effective learning and sustained participation. Empirical evaluations on 23 million learning records from 33,700 learners show that AI Tutor consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across engagement, knowledge retention, and final learning outcomes. Learning path analyses further reveal how AI-Tutor adapts its strategies to learners with diverse profiles, offering adaptive and human-centered support.

Chaofan Zhai, Yicheng Song, Ravi Bapna +1

Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota · MaiMemo Inc.

Educational Technology AI in Education Adaptive Learning

Aug 2, 2026cs.AI

Fighting Fire with Fire: On the Feasibility of Protecting Exercises Against AI Cheating

The widespread adoption of generative AI enables students to outsource cognitive effort to increasingly capable assistants, creating an illusion of competence while undermining the independent reasoning that education aims to cultivate. We investigate whether adversarial machine learning can be repurposed to protect educational exercises against such corrosive reliance. Our approach uses multimodal multiple-choice questions whose visual components can be protected with subtle visual perturbations that steer AI solvers toward designated incorrect answers. These responses form a statistical fingerprint: students who blindly copy a solver reproduce the induced answer pattern more frequently than genuine students. We study the feasibility of this paradigm under realistic black-box assistant assumptions using three of the most common state-of-the-art multimodal language models: Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and OpenAI's ChatGPT. By using accessible surrogate models, we optimize adversarial perturbations that induce consistent response patterns. Those patterns enable principled detection through statistical hypothesis testing. These findings establish both the promise and the limitations of fighting machine-assisted reasoning with the vulnerabilities of the machines themselves.

Tobias Braun, Jonas Grebe, Louis Rethfeld +1

TU Darmstadt & hessian.AI, Germany

Adversarial Attacks on VLMs AI in Education Generative AI in Education

Aug 1, 2026cs.CV

MIDAL: A Dataset of Math Image Descriptions for Accessible Learning

Many open educational resources are lacking in accessibility, especially in-depth image descriptions. In subjects like Science and Mathematics, however, it can be particularly difficult to write image descriptions since there can be many complicated expressions and names depending upon the course level. To help fill that gap in a small way, we introduce Math Image Descriptions for Accessible Learning (MIDAL), a math image-description dataset of 2,020 mathematical images spanning multiple educational levels, to aid in training vision language models to create image descriptions following accessibility best practices. We hope MIDAL is a valuable resource in enhancing the conversation and innovation regarding accessibility of STEM content in higher education. This dataset is however not just limited in math description generation but can also be used to fine-tune language models that can have improved mathematical reasoning and answers.

Rebeka Popek, Vaghawan Ojha, Young Hwan You

School of Natural Science and Mathematics, Indiana University East · Department of AI, E.K. Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

AI in Education

Jul 26, 2026cs.CL

Mwando: Leveraging AI to Preserve and Teach shiKomori

This paper presents Mwando, a virtual educational assistant designed to support the teaching and preservation of shiKomori, the language of the Comoros Islands. The system covers the four main dialectal variants (shiNgazidja, shiMwali, shiNdzuani and shiMaore) through a knowledge base constructed from phrases, proverbs, dictionaries and grammar lessons. A multi-agent architecture combining vector search, a knowledge graph and web search fallback enables accurate and context-aware responses. Evaluation on 500 queries demonstrates strong performance on vocabulary lookup and grammar explanations, while qualitative case studies illustrate both capabilities and current limitations. This work represents an initial step toward computational support for shiKomori and provides a blueprint for developing AI-powered educational tools for other low-resource languages.

Naira Abdou Mohamed, Haidar Nassur Said Ali, Mohamed Hazra +2

Rifai, Moroni, Comoros · CP2BM Lab - Hassan II University, Casablanca, Morocco · Ibn Tofail University, Kenitra, Morocco +1

AI in Education Low-Resource Language Processing

Jul 25, 2026cs.CL

Beyond Direct Answering: Aligning Educational LLMs as Socratic Guides via Heuristic Reinforcement Learning

Large language models (LLMs) deployed in educational settings often behave as direct answerers: they disclose target concepts in the opening turn instead of guiding students through progressive inquiry, as Socratic pedagogy prescribes. We present HeuristicEdu, a two-phase pipeline that aligns Qwen2.5-7B toward Socratic tutoring via supervised warm-up and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Training uses SocraticEdu, 797 multi-turn Chinese children's science dialogues reconstructed from a live platform, with a heuristic reward over cognitive depth (R_cog), curiosity engagement (R_eng), and directness (R_dir), together with a K_query correction for student-introduced terms. We introduce Scaffolding Effectiveness (SE) and Conversation Depth (CD) to evaluate outcomes beyond surface fluency. On 30 held-out questions, the best GRPO variant improves SE from 30.0% to 63.3% and lowers keyword leakage from 30.0% to 13.3%. Notably, this best variant omits the directness penalty during optimization, suggesting that explicit anti-leakage terms can conflict with gradient-based behavioral alignment. An unaligned Qwen-72B baseline reaches 0% SE and 96.7% leakage, showing that scale alone does not induce Socratic behavior.

Xiaokun Wang, Siyu Song, Wentao Liu +1

East China Normal University, Shanghai, China · Shanghai Chuangjie Situo Information Technology Co., Ltd., Shanghai, China · Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China +1

LLM Alignment Intelligent Tutoring Systems AI in Education

Jul 24, 2026cs.HC

Kutti AI: A Voice-First, Offline-Capable Learning Companion with Real-Time Struggle Detection for Visually-Impaired Children

Most educational technology for children is built around visual interfaces, which excludes the many children worldwide who live with visual impairment -- an estimated 1.4 million children are blind and many more have low vision. We present Kutti AI, a voice-first learning companion designed so that audio is the primary and sufficient interface: children learn curriculum concepts through spoken conversation, respond by speaking, and receive spoken feedback, with no reliance on visual elements. The system contributes three practical mechanisms for accessible, adaptive learning on commodity mobile hardware: (1) a multi-signal struggle-detection engine that combines response-latency analysis, wrong-attempt tracking, and keyword-based hesitation detection to decide, in real time, when to offer hints or simplify a question; (2) a multi-layered cross-language answer-matching pipeline that combines language-aware translation/transliteration, Levenshtein-based fuzzy matching, and text normalization so that children are not penalized for code-switching or pronunciation variation; and (3) an offline-first speech pipeline using an on-device automatic speech recognition (ASR) model, enabling use in low-connectivity settings common in underserved communities. We describe the architecture, the interaction flow, and the design decisions that prioritize accessibility, and we report qualitative observations from a hackathon prototype supporting English and Tamil. We discuss lessons learned and outline a path toward formal evaluation with target users. Kutti AI illustrates how a small, carefully-engineered voice-first system can lower both accessibility and financial barriers to early education.

Kadharmoideen Fadurudeen

Independent Researcher

Intelligent Tutoring Systems Educational Technology AI in Education

Jul 23, 2026cs.HC

AI-Integrated Scientific Inquiry: A Practice-Centered Vision for Science Education

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become part of scientific inquiry. Scientists use AI to observe and measure phenomena, to identify patterns in data, and to build models. As AI moves into scientific inquiry, it gains relevance for science education: students should learn how AI is changing scientific practices, ideally by engaging in AI-integrated scientific inquiry themselves. How to design such instruction, grounded in authentic scientific practice rather than taught as a standalone topic, remains an open question. In our vision, which we describe in this article, AI is treated as a set of scientific instruments that students use within the scientific practices described by the Next Generation Science Standards. Each instrument is a genuine scientific tool, pedagogically bounded: its controls are simplified while its core scientific function is preserved. The approach has two aims: engaging students in authentic scientific inquiry, and building an understanding of how AI is used in science and where it can mislead (discipline-based AI literacy, DAIL). In the article, we focus on the investigative core of inquiry, namely observing, analyzing, and modeling, and describe one exemplary AI instrument for each: computer vision for observing, clustering for analyzing, and generative modeling for modeling. We argue that every AI instrument in science education should carry a distinct reflection point that prompts critical evaluation of the AI instrument itself. Finally, we describe how agentic AI, operating across the whole inquiry rather than a single practice, could be represented, arguing that students should first build a foundational understanding of scientific inquiry and AI instruments before relying on agentic AI.

Arne Bewersdorff, Matias Rojas, Xiaoming Zhai

AI4STEM Education Center, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

AI in Education AI Literacy

Jul 16, 2026cs.RO

Mixed-Agent Museum Tour Guide Design Improves Gendered Learning Outcomes and Visitor Preferences

Robots are increasingly integrated into everyday contexts, including museums, where they can both entertain and educate visitors. To enhance visitor experience and engagement, we present a novel mixed-agent tour guide system that combines a physical robot with a projected virtual agent that actively participates in the tour through conversation and interaction, achieving the interaction richness of two mobile agents from a single platform. We validate the system through a within-subjects study with 30 participants to assess engagement, quality of experience, and learning performance. Participants experienced different conversational styles and agent configurations, and data were collected via surveys, behavioral sensors, and interviews. Results showed that engagement and quality of experience remained consistent across conditions. Learning performance revealed a significant gender-moderated difference: the mixed-agent conditions improved learning performance for female participants. This suggests that the proposed dyadic conversational style in this paper influenced learning performance differently by gender. Nonetheless, in interviews, participants reported a greater preference for mixed-agent teams regardless of gender, citing interaction as a key factor in their experience.

Annette M. Masterson, Wonse Jo, Helena C. Sieh +2

School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States · A+HRI Laboratory, Department of Information and Telecommunication Engineering, Incheon National University, Incheon, South Korea. · Department of Robotics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States +2

AI in Education Conversational Agents Human-Robot Interaction

Jul 15, 2026cs.AI

AI-accelerated End-to-End Framework for Rapid Professional Upskilling

By 2030, 59 of every 100 workers will need reskilling or upskilling, yet the average time to close an enterprise skills gap grew from roughly 3 days in 2014 to 36 days in 2018. Most current frameworks accelerate single stages of upskilling programs and generally lack industry validation. We present an end-to-end framework that applies AI acceleration across five stages of knowledge acquisition, content development, content review and verification, teaching, and assessment development; with a strong focus on both production and learning efficiency. Three strong external signals validates the framework: the US National Association of State Boards of Accountancy reviewed and approved an upskilling program built on the framework for continuing-professional-education credits; 3 learners followed the program and passed the NVIDIA Certified Professional in Agentic AI exam in a significantly short amount of time, with 14 more in progress; the program's knowledge base supports complex downstream analysis such as the production of a robust 1,267 risk item dataset for managing multi-agent AI system risks.

Tam Nguyen, Hung Nguyen, Robert Ogburn

Crew Scaler / US Federal Government Washington, DC, USA · Crew Scaler Boston, MA, USA · Crew Scaler / US Federal Government Palm Coast, FL, USA

Educational Technology AI in Education

Jul 15, 2026cs.CY

Learning Engagement Assistant (LEA): Cross-Course Scalability and Classroom Evaluation of an Agentic AI Tutoring System

This paper is an extension of a paper presented at the ICAART 2026 conference, which introduced LEA (Learning Engagement Assistant), an adaptive AI tutoring agent combining course-specific Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with structured Knowledge Component (KC) models across integrated Chat, Tutor, and Quiz modes. That prior work validated LEA on a single STEM course (CMP511) exclusively through simulation, using synthetic learner agents. This paper extends that work by reporting the first classroom deployment of LEA with real students (n = 8, CMP511) and the first empirical test of its cross-course scalability, deploying the system across three courses spanning two academic levels and two disciplinary domains. The study reveals a divergence from simulation predictions across modes, showing that synthetic evaluation alone cannot anticipate all aspects of real deployment. A RAGAS-based cross-course scalability evaluation (660 questions) finds Answer Relevancy and Context Precision broadly stable across courses (0.88-0.94 and 0.88-0.90 respectively), while Faithfulness declines with curriculum distance from the system's original course (0.69 to 0.50), a preliminary finding that may reflect generation logic tuned to the system's original subject rather than a scalability limitation. These findings suggest that while the orchestration layer requires no modification, full course-agnosticism of all downstream components requires further investigation.

Teri Rumble, Javad Zarrin, P. George Lovell +1

Faculty of Design, Informatics and Business, Abertay University, Dundee, United Kingdom.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation Intelligent Tutoring Systems AI in Education LLM Agent Evaluation Cross-Domain Generalization

Jul 14, 2026cs.CY

A Longitudinal Analysis of Public Discourse on AI Ethics in Education Using Twitter Data

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) into education presents significant opportunities to enhance teaching and learning, while raising ethical concerns about the responsible use of these technologies in educational settings. Understanding how the public perceives and debates these issues is increasingly important for educators, institutions, and policymakers seeking to integrate AI responsibly and equitably. Social media platforms, where such debates unfold frequently and at scale, offer a valuable lens for capturing large-scale, real-time public reactions to key developments as they emerge. In this study, we analyse five years (2019-2024) of discourse on Twitter (now X) to trace the evolving public conversation around AI ethics in education, paying particular attention to the release of ChatGPT as a pivotal moment that reshaped the nature and tone of that discourse. Using BERT-based topic modelling and SetFit sentiment analysis to identify dominant themes and track sentiment over time, we find that the discourse has been predominantly positive across the observation period, with negative sentiment concentrated around specific ethical controversies. More recently, anxieties about academic integrity and the broader implications of generative AI have come to dominate the conversation. Rather than reflecting a polarized debate, public discourse appears pragmatic and largely receptive to AI integration, though accompanied by growing calls for ethical oversight and institutional accountability. By providing a longitudinal account of public sentiment surrounding AI ethics in education, this study informs educators, institutions, and policymakers an empirically grounded understanding of public expectations, informing the development of responsible, transparent, and equitable approaches to AI integration across educational contexts.

Akriti Bagale, Nafisa Mehjabin, Ali Ünlü +1

Information Sciences and Technology, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA · School of Education and Human Development, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

AI in Education Generative AI in Education

Jul 13, 2026cs.HC

TRAIL: A Platform for Configurable Human--AI Teaming Experiments

An AI teammate's design properties (personality, communication style, when it speaks) can shape a team's trust, coordination, and decisions. Studying this rigorously demands infrastructure no existing tool provides: reproducible configuration of an AI teammate embedded in instrumented, real-time collaboration sustained over time. We present the Team Research and AI Integration Lab (TRAIL), a web platform that makes the AI teammate a configurable, reproducible design object, pairing a Big Five persona with a selective-participation message pipeline, dual memory, chained longitudinal experiments, and export-ready analytics. In a real six-session classroom deployment (about 51 students), TRAIL sustained longitudinal chaining, held the AI to a stable minority of the conversation, and enabled export-driven AI-human text-similarity analysis. A single blind persona change produced a design-consistent double dissociation: a cognitive-scaffolding agent drew stronger contribution ratings and closer linguistic alignment; a socially-supportive agent, a warmer team climate and lower over-reliance.

Mohammad Amin Samadi, Pedro Martins De Bastos, Jaeyoon Choi +3

School of Education, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

AI in Education Human-AI Interaction Trust in AI Human-AI Collaboration

Jul 13, 2026cs.CY

The Paternalistic Filter: Epistemic Injustice and Differential Refusal in LLM-Mediated History Education for Marginalized Romanian Students

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as conversational tutors, they risk institutionalizing systemic inequalities. This study presents a systematic API audit of four LLMs acting as history tutors, evaluating 1,800 responses regarding the 1989 Romanian Revolution across five student personas varying by ethnicity and socio-economic tier. We uncover four interconnected patterns of \emph{epistemic paternalism}: (1)~~\textbf{Differential Refusal}, where safety-aligned models block 76.7% of educational requests from low-tier students; (2)~~\textbf{Epistemic Gatekeeping}, evidenced by a 3

\times

reduction in access to geopolitical complexity (e.g., the contested ``coup theory'') for marginalized learners; (3)~~\textbf{Agency Theft}, a lexical shift where models like LLaMA produce a 5 $\times$ higher victimization-to-politics vocabulary ratio for Roma students compared to elite peers; and (4)~~\textbf{Elite Hermeneutics}, where AI tutors disproportionately withhold epistemic confidence and justification scores from low-resource demographic profiles. We argue that current safety alignment acts as a paternalistic filter, transforming conversational AI into agents of narrative segregation -- a manifestation of \emph{hermeneutical injustice} in Fricker's~\cite{fricker2007} sense that demands urgent pedagogical auditing.

Alexis Popovici, Andrei Ionascu, Adrian-Marius Dumitran

Universitatea din Bucuresti, Bucharest, Romania

Language Model Safety Evaluation AI in Education Demographic Bias in Language Models Language Model Auditing

Jul 12, 2026cs.CL

Knowledge Distillation for Automated AI Tutor Evaluation

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%).

Tahmid Al Hannan, Diego Garcia, Alex Njoroge +2

Folsom Lake College Folsom, CA, USA

LLM-as-a-Judge AI in Education Automated Evaluation

Jul 9, 2026cs.AI

Using AI-based Learning Assistants in Higher Education: A Large-Scale Descriptive Analysis

In this study, we present a large-scale descriptive analysis of the use of an AI-based learning assistant (Syntea) in higher education. Based on objective log data from 77,543 students enrolled in distance studies, we examine usage patterns across gender, age group, study cluster, degree, and study mode. To date, existing research on educational chatbots has largely relied on comparatively small samples and self-reported survey data, while large-scale evidence on actual usage behavior remains limited. Our findings show that Syntea is already embedded in the study routines of many learners, but that usage differs across demographic and structural contexts. By identifying these patterns, our study provides an empirical basis for the further development of AI-based learning support and contributes a large-scale analysis of educational chatbot usage in higher education.

Kristina Schaaff, Quintus Stierstorfer, Valerie Hekkel

IU International University of Applied Sciences, Erfurt, Germany.

AI in Education Conversational Agents

Jul 9, 2026cs.CL

From Execution to Education: A Bloom-Aligned Framework for Measuring Educational Control in LLMs

We introduce a Bloom-aligned framework for measuring educational control in Large Language Models (LLMs): the ability to preserve a task's instructional intent while shifting its cognitive demand toward specified learning objectives. We apply this framework to programming tasks in computer science education to study the gap between solving tasks and adapting them for learners. Using revised Bloom's Taxonomy as an operational scale of cognitive demand, we evaluate two intervention settings: general difficulty control, where models are asked to make tasks harder or easier, and Bloom's control, where models are asked to target higher or lower Bloom's levels. We evaluate a matched Qwen3-Next model pair, comparing Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct with Qwen3-Coder-Next across 2,520 tasks from three benchmarks. The framework reveals a robust directional asymmetry: both models reliably increase cognitive demand, but struggle to lower it. We further characterize these outcomes with semantic-delta clustering and layer-wise Fisher's Discriminant Ratio probing. Within this controlled comparison, the general model shows clearer middle-layer separability for both general difficulty and Bloom-control contrasts, whereas the coder model shows weaker separability for general difficulty and a deeper peak for Bloom-control contrasts. These results show that strong execution performance does not automatically entail Bloom-aligned educational control.

Yi Zhang, Julia Rayz

School of Applied Creative Computing Purdue University West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA

LLM Evaluation Computer Science Education AI in Education

Jul 2, 2026cs.CL

Beyond Skepticism: Evaluating LLMs Pedagogical Intent Reasoning with the Adaptive Pedagogical Vigilance Framework

The capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason about pedagogical intent within instructional communication remains underexplored, particularly in educational domains such as translation pedagogy. To address this, we propose the \textbf{Adaptive Pedagogical Vigilance (APV)} framework, a novel computational formalism that reframes communicative vigilance as an adaptive mechanism for optimizing learning through intent inference. APV formalizes the problem via a Bayesian Pedagogical Intent Inference Engine (PIIE), which models how instructors select content to maximize pedagogical utility and how vigilant learners should inversely reason about latent instructional configurations -- encompassing genre, stance, and incentives. We evaluate APV through a three-tier hierarchy: distinguishing instructional genre, reasoning about structured pedagogical setups, and generalizing to authentic educational discourse. Experiments on leading LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude 3.5) show that APV substantially improves model vigilance. It achieves the strongest discrimination between pedagogical and exposure-based content, correlates highly with human judgments (

r=0.958

), and maintains robust performance on naturalistic data where baseline methods degrade. This work establishes a unified framework for assessing and enhancing LLMs' understanding of pedagogical motives, advancing the development of more reliable AI-assisted learning systems.

Minghao Chen, Ruihan Zhou, Jiayi Tang +3

Department of Computer Science Zhejiang University

Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Models AI in Education

Jun 30, 2026cs.CL

DigitalCoach: Communication and Grounding Gaps in Human and Agentic Computer Use Coaching

Agents are increasingly capable of automating software tasks, but can they teach humans how to use software themselves? We introduce DigitalCoach, a multimodal dataset of 72 human expert-novice computer use coaching sessions consisting of 22,752 dialogue turns grounded in 28.1 hours of screen and input event recordings across five software applications. We use DigitalCoach to evaluate whether state-of-the-art models can teach humans how to use computers. Automated evaluation shows that models differ from humans in how they coach: models provide more direct instructions, but fewer explanations, error diagnoses, and knowledge-check questions. When we fix the coaching method, models produce utterances similar to human references yet poorly grounded in visual context. Interactive evaluation confirms that model coaches cause learners to passively follow instructions without deeper engagement and fall short in visual grounding. DigitalCoach lays a foundation for collaborative and proactive computer use coaching agents. Data and code are available at https://project-digital-coach.vercel.app.

Meng Chen, Anya Ji, Tsung-Han Wu +4

University of California, Berkeley · 2Technical University of Munich

Computer-Use Agents AI in Education Human-AI Interaction AI Agent Benchmarks Visual Grounding

Jun 29, 2026cs.HC

To Tab or Not to Tab: Measuring Critical Engagement in AI Code Completion Tools Using Behavioral Signals and Attention Checks

AI code completion tools, such as Github Copilot, provide students with code suggestions to help them write programs. However, recent qualitative studies suggest that students fail to critically evaluate these suggestions. We present Clover, a code completion tool that logs students' interactions with code suggestions and additionally offers attention checks to probe reflective engagement during programming tasks. We also develop a taxonomy of behavioral interaction metrics for AI-assisted programming, informed by literature. We analyzed relationships between interaction patterns, engagement with attention checks, and task performance. We observed that higher rates of tab accept were associated with lower attention check performance, while increased dwell time was associated with higher attention check performance. We conclude by discussing how programming process data and attention checks might support reflective engagement in AI-assisted programming.

Jessica Hutchison, Ian Tyler Applebaum, Kenneth Angelikas +6

Temple University Philadelphia, USA

Computer Science Education AI in Education Code Generation Human-AI Collaboration AI-Assisted Software Development

Jun 28, 2026cs.LG

Deterministic Decisions for High-Stakes AI. A Zero-Egress Pipeline with the Deployability of RAG and the Accuracy of Machine Learning

We identify intervention bias as a previously unquantified failure mode of zero-shot large-language-model (LLM) educational advisory agents: without task-specific training, they recommend action when a hindsight-optimal oracle policy mandates inaction. In a six-arm ablation on the Open University Learning Analytics Dataset (N=800 students, four temporal cutoffs), at day 56 -- when the oracle designates 70.1% of students as needing no intervention -- zero-shot GPT-4o recommends action for 73%, a 43 percentage-point false-positive rate. Commercial RAG and SQL-augmented retrieval are comparably miscalibrated; at 10,000 students this implies about 4,300 unnecessary advisor contacts per cycle. Supervised policy learning eliminates this bias: a trajectory-conditioned ONNX Decision Transformer (DT) and a snapshot XGBoost classifier, trained on the same oracle-labelled trajectories under strict prefix-only features, both achieve near-zero calibration error. The DT reaches macro-F1 0.79 (macro-recall 0.85) across all five action classes, predicting even the rare load-reduction action without collapsing, at a 0% action flip rate and sub-5 ms CPU decision latency. The two supervised arms are on par; the DT's edge over XGBoost at the final cutoff is indicative only (unpaired across cohorts). Scope: we validate Stage-2 decision-making (EAV state vector to supervised policy) under controlled oracle input from structured OULAD data; high fidelity reflects feature-oracle alignment, not general high-stakes-AI capability. The most robust finding is the intervention-bias contrast, not the absolute accuracies. We also show an Evaluation Gap: LLM-as-judge scoring (DeepEval G-Eval) is blind to intervention bias, rewarding fluent over-prescription rather than decision quality.

Craig Atkinson

Verificate Pty Ltd, Sydney, Australia

AI in Education LLM Decision-Making Language Model Bias Evaluation