From Explanations to Action: A Zero-Shot, Theory-Driven LLM Framework for Student Performance Feedback

Recent advances in eXplainable AI (XAI) for education have highlighted a critical challenge: ensuring that explanations for state-of-the-art AI models are understandable for non-technical users such as educators and students. In response, we introduce iLLuMinaTE, a zero-shot, chain-of-prompts LLM-XAI pipeline inspired by Miller's cognitive model of explanation. iLLuMinaTE is designed to deliver theory-driven, actionable feedback to students in online courses. iLLuMinaTE navigates three main stages - causal connection, explanation selection, and explanation presentation - with variations drawing from eight social science theories (e.g. Abnormal Conditions, Pearl's Model of Explanation, Necessity and Robustness Selection, Contrastive Explanation). We extensively evaluate 21,915 natural language explanations of iLLuMinaTE extracted from three LLMs (GPT-4o, Gemma2-9B, Llama3-70B), with three different underlying XAI methods (LIME, Counterfactuals, MC-LIME), across students from three diverse online courses. Our evaluation involves analyses of explanation alignment to the social science theory, understandability of the explanation, and a real-world user preference study with 114 university students containing a novel actionability simulation. We find that students prefer iLLuMinaTE explanations over traditional explainers 89.52% of the time. Our work provides a robust, ready-to-use framework for effectively communicating hybrid XAI-driven insights in education, with significant generalization potential for other human-centric fields.

Student Answer Forecasting: Transformer-Driven Answer Choice Prediction for Language Learning

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) enhance personalized learning by predicting student answers to provide immediate and customized instruction. However, recent research has primarily focused on the correctness of the answer rather than the student's performance on specific answer choices, limiting insights into students' thought processes and potential misconceptions. To address this gap, we present MCQStudentBert, an answer forecasting model that leverages the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to integrate contextual understanding of students' answering history along with the text of the questions and answers. By predicting the specific answer choices students are likely to make, practitioners can easily extend the model to new answer choices or remove answer choices for the same multiple-choice question (MCQ) without retraining the model. In particular, we compare MLP, LSTM, BERT, and Mistral 7B architectures to generate embeddings from students' past interactions, which are then incorporated into a finetuned BERT's answer-forecasting mechanism. We apply our pipeline to a dataset of language learning MCQ, gathered from an ITS with over 10,000 students to explore the predictive accuracy of MCQStudentBert, which incorporates student interaction patterns, in comparison to correct answer prediction and traditional mastery-learning feature-based approaches. This work opens the door to more personalized content, modularization, and granular support.

Towards Generalizable Agents in Text-Based Educational Environments: A Study of Integrating RL with LLMs

There has been a growing interest in developing learner models to enhance learning and teaching experiences in educational environments. However, existing works have primarily focused on structured environments relying on meticulously crafted representations of tasks, thereby limiting the agent's ability to generalize skills across tasks. In this paper, we aim to enhance the generalization capabilities of agents in open-ended text-based learning environments by integrating Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Large Language Models (LLMs). We investigate three types of agents: (i) RL-based agents that utilize natural language for state and action representations to find the best interaction strategy, (ii) LLM-based agents that leverage the model's general knowledge and reasoning through prompting, and (iii) hybrid LLM-assisted RL agents that combine these two strategies to improve agents' performance and generalization. To support the development and evaluation of these agents, we introduce PharmaSimText, a novel benchmark derived from the PharmaSim virtual pharmacy environment designed for practicing diagnostic conversations. Our results show that RL-based agents excel in task completion but lack in asking quality diagnostic questions. In contrast, LLM-based agents perform better in asking diagnostic questions but fall short of completing the task. Finally, hybrid LLM-assisted RL agents enable us to overcome these limitations, highlighting the potential of combining RL and LLMs to develop high-performing agents for open-ended learning environments.

Course Recommender Systems Need to Consider the Job Market

Current course recommender systems primarily leverage learner-course interactions, course content, learner preferences, and supplementary course details like instructor, institution, ratings, and reviews, to make their recommendation. However, these systems often overlook a critical aspect: the evolving skill demand of the job market. This paper focuses on the perspective of academic researchers, working in collaboration with the industry, aiming to develop a course recommender system that incorporates job market skill demands. In light of the job market's rapid changes and the current state of research in course recommender systems, we outline essential properties for course recommender systems to address these demands effectively, including explainable, sequential, unsupervised, and aligned with the job market and user's goals. Our discussion extends to the challenges and research questions this objective entails, including unsupervised skill extraction from job listings, course descriptions, and resumes, as well as predicting recommendations that align with learner objectives and the job market and designing metrics to evaluate this alignment. Furthermore, we introduce an initial system that addresses some existing limitations of course recommender systems using large Language Models (LLMs) for skill extraction and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for alignment with the job market. We provide empirical results using open-source data to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Generative AI for Education (GAIED): Advances, Opportunities, and Challenges

This survey article has grown out of the GAIED (pronounced "guide") workshop organized by the authors at the NeurIPS 2023 conference. We organized the GAIED workshop as part of a community-building effort to bring together researchers, educators, and practitioners to explore the potential of generative AI for enhancing education. This article aims to provide an overview of the workshop activities and highlight several future research directions in the area of GAIED.

InterpretCC: Conditional Computation for Inherently Interpretable Neural Networks

Real-world interpretability for neural networks is a tradeoff between three concerns: 1) it requires humans to trust the explanation approximation (e.g. post-hoc approaches), 2) it compromises the understandability of the explanation (e.g. automatically identified feature masks), and 3) it compromises the model performance (e.g. decision trees). These shortcomings are unacceptable for human-facing domains, like education, healthcare, or natural language, which require trustworthy explanations, actionable interpretations, and accurate predictions. In this work, we present InterpretCC (interpretable conditional computation), a family of interpretable-by-design neural networks that guarantee human-centric interpretability while maintaining comparable performance to state-of-the-art models by adaptively and sparsely activating features before prediction. We extend this idea into an interpretable mixture-of-experts model, that allows humans to specify topics of interest, discretely separates the feature space for each data point into topical subnetworks, and adaptively and sparsely activates these topical subnetworks. We demonstrate variations of the InterpretCC architecture for text and tabular data across several real-world benchmarks: six online education courses, news classification, breast cancer diagnosis, and review sentiment.

Finding Paths for Explainable MOOC Recommendation: A Learner Perspective

The increasing availability of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has created a necessity for personalized course recommendation systems. These systems often combine neural networks with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to achieve richer representations of learners and courses. While these enriched representations allow more accurate and personalized recommendations, explainability remains a significant challenge which is especially problematic for certain domains with significant impact such as education and online learning. Recently, a novel class of recommender systems that uses reinforcement learning and graph reasoning over KGs has been proposed to generate explainable recommendations in the form of paths over a KG. Despite their accuracy and interpretability on e-commerce datasets, these approaches have scarcely been applied to the educational domain and their use in practice has not been studied. In this work, we propose an explainable recommendation system for MOOCs that uses graph reasoning. To validate the practical implications of our approach, we conducted a user study examining user perceptions of our new explainable recommendations. We demonstrate the generalizability of our approach by conducting experiments on two educational datasets: COCO and Xuetang.

Unraveling Downstream Gender Bias from Large Language Models: A Study on AI Educational Writing Assistance

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in educational tasks such as providing writing suggestions to students. Despite their potential, LLMs are known to harbor inherent biases which may negatively impact learners. Previous studies have investigated bias in models and data representations separately, neglecting the potential impact of LLM bias on human writing. In this paper, we investigate how bias transfers through an AI writing support pipeline. We conduct a large-scale user study with 231 students writing business case peer reviews in German. Students are divided into five groups with different levels of writing support: one classroom group with feature-based suggestions and four groups recruited from Prolific -- a control group with no assistance, two groups with suggestions from fine-tuned GPT-2 and GPT-3 models, and one group with suggestions from pre-trained GPT-3.5. Using GenBit gender bias analysis, Word Embedding Association Tests (WEAT), and Sentence Embedding Association Test (SEAT) we evaluate the gender bias at various stages of the pipeline: in model embeddings, in suggestions generated by the models, and in reviews written by students. Our results demonstrate that there is no significant difference in gender bias between the resulting peer reviews of groups with and without LLM suggestions. Our research is therefore optimistic about the use of AI writing support in the classroom, showcasing a context where bias in LLMs does not transfer to students' responses.

MultiModN- Multimodal, Multi-Task, Interpretable Modular Networks

Predicting multiple real-world tasks in a single model often requires a particularly diverse feature space. Multimodal (MM) models aim to extract the synergistic predictive potential of multiple data types to create a shared feature space with aligned semantic meaning across inputs of drastically varying sizes (i.e. images, text, sound). Most current MM architectures fuse these representations in parallel, which not only limits their interpretability but also creates a dependency on modality availability. We present MultiModN, a multimodal, modular network that fuses latent representations in a sequence of any number, combination, or type of modality while providing granular real-time predictive feedback on any number or combination of predictive tasks. MultiModN's composable pipeline is interpretable-by-design, as well as innately multi-task and robust to the fundamental issue of biased missingness. We perform four experiments on several benchmark MM datasets across 10 real-world tasks (predicting medical diagnoses, academic performance, and weather), and show that MultiModN's sequential MM fusion does not compromise performance compared with a baseline of parallel fusion. By simulating the challenging bias of missing not-at-random (MNAR), this work shows that, contrary to MultiModN, parallel fusion baselines erroneously learn MNAR and suffer catastrophic failure when faced with different patterns of MNAR at inference. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first inherently MNAR-resistant approach to MM modeling. In conclusion, MultiModN provides granular insights, robustness, and flexibility without compromising performance.

Let Me Teach You: Pedagogical Foundations of Feedback for Language Models

Natural Language Feedback (NLF) is an increasingly popular avenue to align Large Language Models (LLMs) to human preferences. Despite the richness and diversity of the information it can convey, NLF is often hand-designed and arbitrary. In a different world, research in pedagogy has long established several effective feedback models. In this opinion piece, we compile ideas from pedagogy to introduce FELT, a feedback framework for LLMs that outlines the various characteristics of the feedback space, and a feedback content taxonomy based on these variables. Our taxonomy offers both a general mapping of the feedback space, as well as pedagogy-established discrete categories, allowing us to empirically demonstrate the impact of different feedback types on revised generations. In addition to streamlining existing NLF designs, FELT also brings out new, unexplored directions for research in NLF. We make our taxonomy available to the community, providing guides and examples for mapping our categorizations to future resources.