Bridging the Novice-Expert Gap via Models of Decision-Making: A Case Study on Remediating Math Mistakes

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Rose E., Zhang, Qingyang, Robinson, Carly, Loeb, Susanna, Demszky, Dorottya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Wang, Rose E.
Zhang, Qingyang
Robinson, Carly
Loeb, Susanna
Demszky, Dorottya
author_facet Wang, Rose E.
Zhang, Qingyang
Robinson, Carly
Loeb, Susanna
Demszky, Dorottya
contents Scaling high-quality tutoring remains a major challenge in education. Due to growing demand, many platforms employ novice tutors who, unlike experienced educators, struggle to address student mistakes and thus fail to seize prime learning opportunities. Our work explores the potential of large language models (LLMs) to close the novice-expert knowledge gap in remediating math mistakes. We contribute Bridge, a method that uses cognitive task analysis to translate an expert's latent thought process into a decision-making model for remediation. This involves an expert identifying (A) the student's error, (B) a remediation strategy, and (C) their intention before generating a response. We construct a dataset of 700 real tutoring conversations, annotated by experts with their decisions. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on our dataset and find that the expert's decision-making model is critical for LLMs to close the gap: responses from GPT4 with expert decisions (e.g., "simplify the problem") are +76% more preferred than without. Additionally, context-sensitive decisions are critical to closing pedagogical gaps: random decisions decrease GPT4's response quality by -97% than expert decisions. Our work shows the potential of embedding expert thought processes in LLM generations to enhance their capability to bridge novice-expert knowledge gaps. Our dataset and code can be found at: \url{https://github.com/rosewang2008/bridge}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_10648
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bridging the Novice-Expert Gap via Models of Decision-Making: A Case Study on Remediating Math Mistakes
Wang, Rose E.
Zhang, Qingyang
Robinson, Carly
Loeb, Susanna
Demszky, Dorottya
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Scaling high-quality tutoring remains a major challenge in education. Due to growing demand, many platforms employ novice tutors who, unlike experienced educators, struggle to address student mistakes and thus fail to seize prime learning opportunities. Our work explores the potential of large language models (LLMs) to close the novice-expert knowledge gap in remediating math mistakes. We contribute Bridge, a method that uses cognitive task analysis to translate an expert's latent thought process into a decision-making model for remediation. This involves an expert identifying (A) the student's error, (B) a remediation strategy, and (C) their intention before generating a response. We construct a dataset of 700 real tutoring conversations, annotated by experts with their decisions. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on our dataset and find that the expert's decision-making model is critical for LLMs to close the gap: responses from GPT4 with expert decisions (e.g., "simplify the problem") are +76% more preferred than without. Additionally, context-sensitive decisions are critical to closing pedagogical gaps: random decisions decrease GPT4's response quality by -97% than expert decisions. Our work shows the potential of embedding expert thought processes in LLM generations to enhance their capability to bridge novice-expert knowledge gaps. Our dataset and code can be found at: \url{https://github.com/rosewang2008/bridge}.
title Bridging the Novice-Expert Gap via Models of Decision-Making: A Case Study on Remediating Math Mistakes
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10648