We study how prompt-level inductive biases influence the cognitive behavior of large language models (LLMs) in instructional dialogue. We introduce a symbolic scaffolding method paired with a short-term memory schema designed to promote adaptive, structured reasoning in Socratic tutoring. Using controlled ablation across five system variants, we evaluate model outputs via expert-designed rubrics covering scaffolding, responsiveness, symbolic reasoning, and conversational memory. We present preliminary results using an LLM-based evaluation framework aligned to a cognitively grounded rubric. This enables scalable, systematic comparisons across architectural variants in early-stage experimentation. The preliminary results show that our full system consistently outperforms baseline variants. Analysis reveals that removing memory or symbolic structure degrades key cognitive behaviors, including abstraction, adaptive probing, and conceptual continuity. These findings support a processing-level account in which prompt-level cognitive scaffolds can reliably shape emergent instructional strategies in LLMs.

We study the problem of zero-shot exercise retrieval in the context of online language learning, to give learners the ability to explicitly request personalized exercises via natural language. Using real-world data collected from language learners, we observe that vector similarity approaches poorly capture the relationship between exercise content and the language that learners use to express what they want to learn. This semantic gap between queries and content dramatically reduces the effectiveness of general-purpose retrieval models pretrained on large scale information retrieval datasets like MS MARCO. We leverage the generative capabilities of large language models to bridge the gap by synthesizing hypothetical exercises based on the learner's input, which are then used to search for relevant exercises. Our approach, which we call mHyER, overcomes three challenges: (1) lack of relevance labels for training, (2) unrestricted learner input content, and (3) low semantic similarity between input and retrieval candidates. mHyER outperforms several strong baselines on two novel benchmarks created from crowdsourced data and publicly available data.

Yim, what have you been working on for the past 2 years? It's this paper that just got accepted at the ACM International Computing Education Research (ICER) conference! Here's a pre-print of the paper: Learning Machine Learning with Personal Data Helps Stakeholders Ground Advocacy Arguments in Model Mechanics (Yim Register & Amy J. Ko, 2020) Gotta love academic titles am I right? But don't worry, I've saved you the trouble of reading the paper by summarizing it in this blog post. Because A) honestly, it is long and fancy and a bit jargony and B) because how else would you get to read all my jokes?