EduClaw-Bench is introduced, 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.
Abstract
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 (Gagn\'e 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.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as AI tutors, but a correct answer is not always a pedagogically appropriate one. In classroom learning, effective help depends not only on correctness, but also on whether a response matches the learner's current foundation, the course sequence, and the timing of concept introduction. Existing evaluations focus mainly on answer quality, leaving this instructional fit under-measured. We present the Pedagogical Suitability Index (PSI), a composite metric of six theory-informed sub-scores that evaluates how well LLM-generated tutoring responses align with learner readiness and curricular progression, and we further use PSI as a structured feedback signal for response improvement. We evaluate four LLM tutors (ChatGPT, Gemini, Gemma4, and Qwen3) across 240 scenario-based evaluations using paired standard and defective prompts, then apply a PSI-guided regeneration protocol to 62 weak-performing cases. Baseline differences across the four tested models were modest overall (PSI range: 0.557 to 0.638), and open-weight and closed models did not exhibit a clear separation in pedagogical fit. Under the tested prompt perturbations, overall PSI remained largely stable (Delta = -0.002), though sub-score trade-offs emerged. More importantly, PSI-guided feedback substantially improved weak-performing cases: 51 of 62 cases improved (82.3%). Focused manual evaluation of the 62 PSI-selected weak cases provides initial evidence that the identified weaknesses are instructionally meaningful and that many PSI-guided regenerations correspond to human-judged improvement. These results suggest that learner- and curriculum-aware alignment may matter more for effective tutoring than model category alone, and that such alignment is both measurable and improvable.
Benjamin Barlog, Hudson Craig, Zedong Peng· 0 citations
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 et al.· 0 citations
Large language models are increasingly deployed in education as tutors, teaching assistants, and content generators. These roles place demands that ordinary question answering does not: a usable education-facing model is supposed to be accurate, safe under sensitive prompts, instructionally useful, and aligned with pedagogical goals at the same time. Existing benchmarks evaluate these requirements largely in isolation, so none assesses education-facing suitability as an integrated profile. We introduce ELBench, the first benchmark to evaluate all four requirements (General Capability, Safety and Trustworthiness, Basic Education, and High-Level Cultivation) on the same models under a common protocol, combining curated public sources with newly synthesized safety and cultivation data. We evaluate nine models, seven frontier general-purpose systems and two education-specialized variants, and report three findings. First, module-level profiles are more informative than a single aggregate: the top six models are statistically indistinguishable on overall score, yet their module leaders differ substantially, and safety is anti-correlated with practical teaching (r = -0.83). Second, the Chinese-developed models lead the safety module, the most discriminative in the suite; this advantage is largest on region-specific normative content and narrows, but does not vanish, on universal-harm content. Third, the two education-specialized models lead neither education module, and on High-Level Cultivation all models share a systematic blind spot: on the structured judgment task they converge on the same non-reference option, favoring pedagogical style over fit to the stated goal, so the module scores uniformly low and does not separate models. This raises, but does not resolve, whether domain post-training keeps pace with frontier systems on education tasks.
Yilin Jiang, Xiaorong Zhu, Fei Tan et al.· 0 citations
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. Lovell et al.· 0 citations
CSTutorBench is introduced, a benchmark for evaluating language models as CS tutors in VEX VR, a block-based robotics environment, and preliminary findings reveal that models perform well on surface-level criteria such as vocabulary and tone but struggle with deeper pedagogical behaviors.
Students increasingly use LLMs as tutors for coursework and problem solving. Little is known about the level of assistance LLMs provide when students use them as tutors in authentic learning interactions. This matters because tutoring responses can differ substantially in how directly they help students complete a task. We operationalize this dimension as scaffolding level and develop a five-level scale, validated against human annotations, that characterizes responses according to the degree of direct assistance they provide. We apply the scale to 14,637 LLM responses from 203 students in a university AI course. Responses are overwhelmingly concentrated at high levels of assistance, with more than 95% classified as either Explaining or Solving. Scaffolding level is systematically associated with students'subsequent conversational behavior, but provides little additional predictive information about performance on three subsequent exams beyond prior achievement and dialogue behavior. These findings provide an empirical baseline for LLM assistance in tutoring interactions and a measurement framework for evaluating how alternative tutoring designs change that assistance.
Suhyeon Lee, Juneha Baek, Jaehyeong Park et al.· 0 citations