LLM impacts on child parent learning studied through activity theory

Characterizing LLM-Based Family Education through the Lens of Activity Theory: A Scoping Review of the HCI Literature

Human-Computer Interaction

Summary

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming more common in family education, especially between parents and children, but how they affect learning activities isn’t well understood. The authors looked at 53 studies from human-computer interaction research to see how LLMs change who does the educational work, how they interact, and the rules families follow. They found that LLMs often help make conversations and learning feel more natural but parents and professionals still decide how to use the model’s responses. More research is needed to understand how families keep LLMs personalized and manage authority during learning.

What this means in practice

A survey. It maps existing work.

Authors

Lan Luo, Yuqi Liang, Jie Cai, Anqi Wang, Dongyijie Pan, Muzhi Zhou, Chun Yu, Pan Hui

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in family education, yet HCI has not systematically explained the educational interactions that emerge around them. This scoping review analyzes 53 HCI studies from 6,540 records across 19 venues. Using activity theory and AODM, it relates participants and educational objects to mediation, labour, and rules. We find that the literature centers on child--parent interaction and on language, AI literacy, and relational learning. The introduction of LLMs enabled conversational, embodied, and spatial systems to generate support from the context of an unfolding interaction. LLMs redistributed educational labour, while family and institutional rules left parents and professionals responsible for interpreting outputs and deciding how they entered practice. Evidence across families and educational purposes remains limited, especially on sustained personalization, repair labour, and how families negotiate authority and rules. The review offers a framework explaining how LLM capabilities become organized through family participation.
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