Papers for

online tutoring platform engineers

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.

Unified framework predicts question difficulty and student answers in tutoring

A Unified Response Framework for Questions and Tutoring Dialogues

Abstract: Existing student models in educational applications largely focus on student responses to questions. However, as tutoring becomes more accessible at large scale, it is important to analyze dialogues between tutors and students, which may reveal fine-grained evidence on student knowledge. In this work, we propose a unified framework that models both student responses to questions and tutor-posed subtasks during dialogues on a shared item response theory (IRT) scale. We first identify mathematical subtasks in tutoring dialogues, rewrite them into self-contained questions, and identify the correctness of student responses to these subtasks. We then develop an IRT framework that estimates question/subtask difficulty from text, tracks students' evolving abilities across question-answering and dialogue interactions, and a novel method to leverages tutor moves between consecutive subtasks to regularize their difficulty values. We evaluate our framework on two real-world math education datasets containing both human- and AI-tutored dialogues. Results show that our framework outperforms strong baselines on both question difficulty prediction and response correctness prediction.

Wed 14 OctComputation and LanguageComputers and SocietyMachine Learning
The gist
Many educational tools focus only on how students answer questions, but tutoring often involves back-and-forth conversations that provide more clues about what a student knows. The authors developed a method that treats both questions and parts of tutoring talks the same way to better understand student learning. Their approach turns tutoring dialogue into clear questions, estimates how hard these are, and keeps track of how students improve over time. Tests on real math tutoring conversations showed this method predicts question difficulty and student answers more accurately than previous approaches.
Open → 2610.19532v1