Accessing quality preparation and feedback for the Romanian Bacalaureat exam is challenging, particularly for students in remote or underserved areas. This paper introduces BacPrep, an experimental online platform exploring Large Language Model (LLM) potential for automated assessment, aiming to offer a free, accessible resource. Using official exam questions from the last 5 years, BacPrep employs one of Google's newest models, Gemini 2.0 Flash (released Feb 2025), guided by official grading schemes, to provide experimental feedback. Currently operational, its primary research function is collecting student solutions and LLM outputs. This focused dataset is vital for planned expert validation to rigorously evaluate the feasibility and accuracy of this cutting-edge LLM in the specific Bacalaureat context before reliable deployment.

The vast pre-existing slides serve as rich and important materials to carry lecture knowledge. However, effectively leveraging lecture slides to serve students is difficult due to the multi-modal nature of slide content and the heterogeneous teaching actions. We study the problem of discovering effective designs that convert a slide into an interactive lecture. We develop Slide2Lecture, a tuning-free and knowledge-regulated intelligent tutoring system that can (1) effectively convert an input lecture slide into a structured teaching agenda consisting of a set of heterogeneous teaching actions; (2) create and manage an interactive lecture that generates responsive interactions catering to student learning demands while regulating the interactions to follow teaching actions. Slide2Lecture contains a complete pipeline for learners to obtain an interactive classroom experience to learn the slide. For teachers and developers, Slide2Lecture enables customization to cater to personalized demands. The evaluation rated by annotators and students shows that Slide2Lecture is effective in outperforming the remaining implementation. Slide2Lecture's online deployment has made more than 200K interaction with students in the 3K lecture sessions. We open source Slide2Lecture's implementation in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/slide2lecture-4210/.

Small-group tutoring in Computer Science (CS) is effective, but presents the challenge of providing a dedicated tutor for each group and encouraging collaboration among group members at scale. We present Pensieve Discuss, a software platform that integrates synchronous editing for scaffolded programming problems with online human and AI tutors, designed to improve student collaboration and experience during group tutoring sessions. Our semester-long deployment to 800 students in a CS1 course demonstrated consistently high collaboration rates, positive feedback about the AI tutor's helpfulness and correctness, increased satisfaction with the group tutoring experience, and a substantial increase in question volume. The use of our system was preferred over an interface lacking AI tutors and synchronous editing capabilities. Our experiences suggest that small-group tutoring sessions are an important avenue for future research in educational AI.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) have shown great potential in delivering personalized and adaptive education, but their widespread adoption has been hindered by the need for specialized programming and design skills. Existing approaches overcome the programming limitations with no-code authoring through drag and drop, however they assume that educators possess the necessary skills to design effective and engaging tutor interfaces. To address this assumption we introduce generative AI capabilities to assist educators in creating tutor interfaces that meet their needs while adhering to design principles. Our approach leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and prompt engineering to generate tutor layout and contents based on high-level requirements provided by educators as inputs. However, to allow them to actively participate in the design process, rather than relying entirely on AI-generated solutions, we allow generation both at the entire interface level and at the individual component level. The former provides educators with a complete interface that can be refined using direct manipulation, while the latter offers the ability to create specific elements to be added to the tutor interface. A small-scale comparison shows the potential of our approach to enhance the efficiency of tutor interface design. Moving forward, we raise critical questions for assisting educators with generative AI capabilities to create personalized, effective, and engaging tutors, ultimately enhancing their adoption.

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) that imitate human tutors and aim to provide immediate and customized instructions or feedback to learners have shown their effectiveness in education. With the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) further entitle the systems to complex and coherent conversational interactions. These systems would be of great help in language education as it involves developing skills in communication, which, however, drew relatively less attention. Additionally, due to the complicated cognitive development at younger ages, more endeavors are needed for practical uses. Scaffolding refers to a teaching technique where teachers provide support and guidance to students for learning and developing new concepts or skills. It is an effective way to support diverse learning needs, goals, processes, and outcomes. In this work, we investigate how pedagogical instructions facilitate the scaffolding in ITSs, by conducting a case study on guiding children to describe images for language learning. We construct different types of scaffolding tutoring systems grounded in four fundamental learning theories: knowledge construction, inquiry-based learning, dialogic teaching, and zone of proximal development. For qualitative and quantitative analyses, we build and refine a seven-dimension rubric to evaluate the scaffolding process. In our experiment on GPT-4V, we observe that LLMs demonstrate strong potential to follow pedagogical instructions and achieve self-paced learning in different student groups. Moreover, we extend our evaluation framework from a manual to an automated approach, paving the way to benchmark various conversational tutoring systems.

Conversational tutoring systems (CTSs) offer learning experiences driven by natural language interaction. They are known to promote high levels of cognitive engagement and benefit learning outcomes, particularly in reasoning tasks. Nonetheless, the time and cost required to author CTS content is a major obstacle to widespread adoption. In this paper, we introduce a novel type of CTS that leverages the recent advances in large language models (LLMs) in two ways: First, the system induces a tutoring script automatically from a lesson text. Second, the system automates the script orchestration via two LLM-based agents (Ruffle&Riley) with the roles of a student and a professor in a learning-by-teaching format. The system allows a free-form conversation that follows the ITS-typical inner and outer loop structure. In an initial between-subject online user study (N = 100) comparing Ruffle&Riley to simpler QA chatbots and reading activity, we found no significant differences in post-test scores. Nonetheless, in the learning experience survey, Ruffle&Riley users expressed higher ratings of understanding and remembering and further perceived the offered support as more helpful and the conversation as coherent. Our study provides insights for a new generation of scalable CTS technologies.

We present an adaptive learning Intelligent Tutoring System, which uses model-based reinforcement learning in the form of contextual bandits to assign learning activities to students. The model is trained on the trajectories of thousands of students in order to maximize their exercise completion rates and continues to learn online, automatically adjusting itself to new activities. A randomized controlled trial with students shows that our model leads to superior completion rates and significantly improved student engagement when compared to other approaches. Our approach is fully-automated unlocking new opportunities for learning experience personalization.

A major challenge in the field of education is providing review schedules that present learned items at appropriate intervals to each student so that memory is retained over time. In recent years, attempts have been made to formulate item reviews as sequential decision-making problems to realize adaptive instruction based on the knowledge state of students. It has been reported previously that reinforcement learning can help realize mathematical models of students learning strategies to maintain a high memory rate. However, optimization using reinforcement learning requires a large number of interactions, and thus it cannot be applied directly to actual students. In this study, we propose a framework for optimizing teaching strategies by constructing a virtual model of the student while minimizing the interaction with the actual teaching target. In addition, we conducted an experiment considering actual instructions using the mathematical model and confirmed that the model performance is comparable to that of conventional teaching methods. Our framework can directly substitute mathematical models used in experiments with human students, and our results can serve as a buffer between theoretical instructional optimization and practical applications in e-learning systems.

According to a research report, artificial intelligence in the global education market is projected to reach USD3.68 billion by 2023, registering a CAGR of 47%. The role of AI in education is huge and imperative in the current scenario. AI along with other disruptive technology has given rise to EdTech and smart learning methods. It has now entered into another significant area, which is Intelligent Tutoring. Intelligent tutoring systems, as the name suggests is an intelligent computer system that can effectively provide instructions to the learners and enables a feedback system with minimal human intervention.

Back in the 1990s we started work on pedagogical agents, a new user interface paradigm for interactive learning environments. Pedagogical agents are autonomous characters that inhabit learning environments and can engage with learners in rich, face-to-face interactions. Building on this work, in 2000 we, together with our colleague, Jeff Rickel, published an article on pedagogical agents that surveyed this new paradigm and discussed its potential. We made the case that pedagogical agents that interact with learners in natural, life-like ways can help learning environments achieve improved learning outcomes. This article has been widely cited, and was a winner of the 2017 IFAAMAS Award for Influential Papers in Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS, 2017). On the occasion of receiving the IFAAMAS award, and after twenty years of work on pedagogical agents, we decided to take another look at the future of the field. We’ll start by revisiting our predictions for pedagogical agents back in 2000, and examine which of those predictions panned out. Then, informed what we have learned since then, we will take another look at emerging trends and the future of pedagogical agents. Advances in natural language dialogue, affective computing, machine learning, virtual environments, and robotics are making possible even more lifelike and effective pedagogical agents, with potentially profound effects on the way people learn.