Why does chocolate turn white? No need to worry--some molecules just moved around. The white splotches on these pieces of chocolate are known as'chocolate bloom.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A few years ago, a small baker from the West Coast had a problem. A day or so after baking chocolate chip cookies, the chocolate chips would develop an unpleasant white haze.

Amateur mathematicians are using artificial intelligence chatbots to solve long-standing problems, in a move that has taken professionals by surprise. While the problems in question aren't the most advanced in the mathematical canon, the success of AI models in tackling them shows that their mathematical performance has passed a significant threshold, say researchers, and could fundamentally change the way we do mathematics. The questions being solved by AI originate from Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, who was famous for his ability to pose useful but difficult questions during a career that spanned over six decades. "The questions tended to be very simple, but very hard," says Thomas Bloom at the University of Manchester, UK. By his death in 1996, there were more than 1000 of these unsolved Erdős problems, spanning a wide range of mathematical disciplines, from combinatorics (the study of combinations) to number theory.

Harmful algal blooms are a growing threat to inland water quality and public health worldwide, creating an urgent need for e fficient, accurate, and cost-e ff ective detection methods. This research introduces a high-performing methodology that integrates multiple open-source remote sensing data with advanced artificial intelligence models. Key data sources include Copernicus Sentinel-2 optical imagery, the Copernicus Digital Elevation Model (DEM), and NOAA's High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) climate data, all e ffi ciently retrieved using platforms like Google Earth Engine (GEE) and Microsoft Planetary Computer (MPC). The NIR and two SWIR bands from Sentinel-2, the altitude from the elevation model, the temperature and wind from NOAA as well as the longitude and latitude were the most important features. The approach combines two types of machine learning models--tree-based models and a neural network--into an ensemble for classifying algal bloom severity. While the tree models performed strongly on their own, incorporating a neural network added robustness and demonstrated how deep learning models can e ff ectively use diverse remote sensing inputs. The method leverages high-resolution satellite imagery and AI-driven analysis to monitor algal blooms dynamically, and although initially developed for a NASA competition in the U.S., it shows potential for global application. Keywords: Machine learning; Inland Water; Algal Bloom; Remote Sensing; Data Fusion; Water Quality 1. Introduction Algal blooms are becoming the greatest inland water quality threat to public health and aquatic ecosystems that can degrade water quality to a greater extent than many chemicals (Brooks et al., 2016). Human nutrient loading and climate change (warming, altered rainfall) synergistically enhance cyanobacterial blooms in aquatic ecosystems (Paerl and Paul, 2012). Excessive nutrient loads in many cases comes from agricultural, industrial and other sources (Novotny, 2011). Phenology and trends of chlorophyll-a and cyanobacterial blooms are established (Matthews, 2014).

This paper explores the automatic classification of exam questions and learning outcomes according to Bloom's Taxonomy. A small dataset of 600 sentences labeled with six cognitive categories - Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation - was processed using traditional machine learning (ML) models (Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines), recurrent neural network architectures (LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU, BiGRU), transformer-based models (BERT and RoBERTa), and large language models (OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama, Anthropic). Each model was evaluated under different preprocessing and augmentation strategies (for example, synonym replacement, word embeddings, etc.). Among traditional ML approaches, Support Vector Machines (SVM) with data augmentation achieved the best overall performance, reaching 94 percent accuracy, recall, and F1 scores with minimal overfitting. In contrast, the RNN models and BERT suffered from severe overfitting, while RoBERTa initially overcame it but began to show signs as training progressed. Finally, zero-shot evaluations of large language models (LLMs) indicated that OpenAI and Gemini performed best among the tested LLMs, achieving approximately 0.72-0.73 accuracy and comparable F1 scores. These findings highlight the challenges of training complex deep models on limited data and underscore the value of careful data augmentation and simpler algorithms (such as augmented SVM) for Bloom's Taxonomy classification.

However, using these 50B+ models requires high-end hardware, making them inaccessible to most researchers.

Personalized learning has gained attention in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education, where engagement and motivation play crucial roles in reading comprehension. We propose a novel approach to generating personalized English reading comprehension tests tailored to students' interests. We develop a structured content transcreation pipeline using OpenAI's gpt-4o, where we start with the RACE-C dataset, and generate new passages and multiple-choice reading comprehension questions that are linguistically similar to the original passages but semantically aligned with individual learners' interests. Our methodology integrates topic extraction, question classification based on Bloom's taxonomy, linguistic feature analysis, and content transcreation to enhance student engagement. We conduct a controlled experiment with EFL learners in South Korea to examine the impact of interest-aligned reading materials on comprehension and motivation. Our results show students learning with personalized reading passages demonstrate improved comprehension and motivation retention compared to those learning with non-personalized materials.

Generating high-quality MCQs, especially those targeting diverse cognitive levels and incorporating common misconceptions into distractor design, is time-consuming and expertise-intensive, making manual creation impractical at scale. Current automated approaches typically generate questions at lower cognitive levels and fail to incorporate domain-specific misconceptions. This paper presents a hierarchical concept map-based framework that provides structured knowledge to guide LLMs in generating MCQs with distractors. We chose high-school physics as our test domain and began by developing a hierarchical concept map covering major Physics topics and their interconnections with an efficient database design. Next, through an automated pipeline, topic-relevant sections of these concept maps are retrieved to serve as a structured context for the LLM to generate questions and distractors that specifically target common misconceptions. Lastly, an automated validation is completed to ensure that the generated MCQs meet the requirements provided. We evaluate our framework against two baseline approaches: a base LLM and a RAG-based generation. We conducted expert evaluations and student assessments of the generated MCQs. Expert evaluation shows that our method significantly outperforms the baseline approaches, achieving a success rate of 75.20% in meeting all quality criteria compared to approximately 37% for both baseline methods. Student assessment data reveal that our concept map-driven approach achieved a significantly lower guess success rate of 28.05% compared to 37.10% for the baselines, indicating a more effective assessment of conceptual understanding. The results demonstrate that our concept map-based approach enables robust assessment across cognitive levels and instant identification of conceptual gaps, facilitating faster feedback loops and targeted interventions at scale.

ABSTRACT Design/methodology/approach This study proposes a cognitive benchmarking framework to evaluate how large language models (LLMs) process and apply culturally specific knowledge. The framework integrates Bloom's Taxonomy with Retrieval - Augmented Generation (RAG) to assess model perform ance across six hierarchical cognitive domains: Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating. Using a curated Taiwanese Hakka digital cultural archive as the primary testbed, the evaluation measures LLM - generated responses' sem antic accuracy and cultural relevance. Purpose This research evaluates how effectively LLMs represent and generate minority cultural knowledge, specifically Taiwanese Hakka culture. To address this, the study proposes a structured and replicable evaluation framework integrating Bloom's Taxonomy and RAG . The research is guided by the following questions: (1) How do LLMs perform across different cognitive domains when processing Hakka ...

This study evaluates the pedagogical soundness and usability of AI-generated lesson plans across five leading large language models: ChatGPT (GPT-5), Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, DeepSeek V3.2, and Grok 4. Beyond model choice, three structured prompt frameworks were tested: TAG (Task, Audience, Goal), RACE (Role, Audience, Context, Execution), and COSTAR (Context, Objective, Style, Tone, Audience, Response Format). Fifteen lesson plans were generated for a single high-school physics topic, The Electromagnetic Spectrum. The lesson plans were analyzed through four automated computational metrics: (1) readability and linguistic complexity, (2) factual accuracy and hallucination detection, (3) standards and curriculum alignment, and (4) cognitive demand of learning objectives. Results indicate that model selection exerted the strongest influence on linguistic accessibility, with DeepSeek producing the most readable teaching plan (FKGL = 8.64) and Claude generating the densest language (FKGL = 19.89). The prompt framework structure most strongly affected the factual accuracy and pedagogical completeness, with the RACE framework yielding the lowest hallucination index and the highest incidental alignment with NGSS curriculum standards. Across all models, the learning objectives in the fifteen lesson plans clustered at the Remember and Understand tiers of Bloom's taxonomy. There were limited higher-order verbs in the learning objectives extracted. Overall, the findings suggest that readability is significantly governed by model design, while instructional reliability and curricular alignment depend more on the prompt framework. The most effective configuration for lesson plans identified in the results was to combine a readability-optimized model with the RACE framework and an explicit checklist of physics concepts, curriculum standards, and higher-order objectives.

Scientific sketches (e.g., models) offer a powerful lens into students' conceptual understanding, yet AI-powered automated assessment of such free-form, visually diverse artifacts remains a critical challenge. Existing solutions often treat sketch evaluation as either an image classification task or monolithic vision-language models, which lack interpretability, pedagogical alignment, and adaptability across cognitive levels. To address these limitations, we present SketchMind, a cognitively grounded, multi-agent framework for evaluating and improving student-drawn scientific sketches. SketchMind comprises modular agents responsible for rubric parsing, sketch perception, cognitive alignment, and iterative feedback with sketch modification, enabling personalized and transparent evaluation. We evaluate SketchMind on a curated dataset of 3,575 student-generated sketches across six science assessment items with different highest order of Bloom's level that require students to draw models to explain phenomena. Compared to baseline GPT-4o performance without SRG (average accuracy: 55.6%), and with SRG integration achieves 77.1% average accuracy (+21.4% average absolute gain). We also demonstrate that multi-agent orchestration with SRG enhances SketchMind performance, for example, GPT-4.1 gains an average 8.9% increase in sketch prediction accuracy, outperforming single-agent pipelines across all items. Human evaluators rated the feedback and co-created sketches generated by \textsc{SketchMind} with GPT-4.1, which achieved an average of 4.1 out of 5, significantly higher than those of baseline models (e.g., 2.3 for GPT-4o). Experts noted the system's potential to meaningfully support conceptual growth through guided revision. Our code and (pending approval) dataset will be released to support reproducibility and future research in AI-driven education.