Papers for
adaptive learning platform developers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Algorithmic drift can cause bias in adaptive tutoring systems
Algorithmic drift in generative adaptive learning
Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence promises to democratize personalized tutoring, yet the longitudinal stability of adaptive systems remains under-theorized. Current ethical discourse focuses on static bias. This paper argues that a distinct threat lies in algorithmic drift: a feedback loop in which minor, demographically asymmetric observation errors compound over time into systemic inequities. We make three contributions. First, we formalize algorithmic drift as a coupled learner--tutor dynamical system. Second, we corroborate this theory with an agent-based Monte Carlo simulation in which either a transparent online tracker or an LSTM deep-knowledge-tracing network drives an IRT-based curriculum policy. Third, we introduce the temporal fairness stabilizer (TFS), a targeted intervention that periodically re-probes learner capability, and benchmark it against standard exploration baselines with explicit group-fairness metrics and replication-level inference. Within the modeled environment, TFS closes the achievement gap where generic exploration does not, and we characterize the conditions under which it succeeds. We separate what is established analytically, what is demonstrated in simulation, and what remains to be validated with real learners. Our results reframe algorithmic fairness in education as a temporal property of a closed loop rather than a deployment-time checkbox.
Learner simulation skills reduce costs and improve behavior reuse
From Learner Behavior to Reusable Skills for Effective and Efficient Learner Simulation
Abstract: Learner simulation aims to reproduce how a particular learner behaves on new tasks. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate increasingly fine-grained learning behaviors, existing approaches often need to repeatedly process a growing interaction history to reconstruct the learner. This introduces additional context and inference costs and makes the acquired learner-specific simulation capability difficult to reuse across different LLMs. We therefore propose Learner2Skill, which externalizes the simulation capability acquired from historical interactions into a persistent and reusable Simulation Skill. The Skill captures the learner's current learning state and recurring response patterns, evolves as new real interactions arrive, and can be adapted to a new LLM through lightweight executor calibration without reconstructing the learner from scratch. Experiments show that Learner2Skill more faithfully reproduces fine-grained learner behavior while reducing overall token cost, and that the same constructed Skills can be effectively reused across different LLM executors.