Evaluating and Optimizing Educational Content with Large Language Model Judgments

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: He-Yueya, Joy, Goodman, Noah D., Brunskill, Emma
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author He-Yueya, Joy
Goodman, Noah D.
Brunskill, Emma
author_facet He-Yueya, Joy
Goodman, Noah D.
Brunskill, Emma
contents Creating effective educational materials generally requires expensive and time-consuming studies of student learning outcomes. To overcome this barrier, one idea is to build computational models of student learning and use them to optimize instructional materials. However, it is difficult to model the cognitive processes of learning dynamics. We propose an alternative approach that uses Language Models (LMs) as educational experts to assess the impact of various instructions on learning outcomes. Specifically, we use GPT-3.5 to evaluate the overall effect of instructional materials on different student groups and find that it can replicate well-established educational findings such as the Expertise Reversal Effect and the Variability Effect. This demonstrates the potential of LMs as reliable evaluators of educational content. Building on this insight, we introduce an instruction optimization approach in which one LM generates instructional materials using the judgments of another LM as a reward function. We apply this approach to create math word problem worksheets aimed at maximizing student learning gains. Human teachers' evaluations of these LM-generated worksheets show a significant alignment between the LM judgments and human teacher preferences. We conclude by discussing potential divergences between human and LM opinions and the resulting pitfalls of automating instructional design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_02795
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating and Optimizing Educational Content with Large Language Model Judgments
He-Yueya, Joy
Goodman, Noah D.
Brunskill, Emma
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Creating effective educational materials generally requires expensive and time-consuming studies of student learning outcomes. To overcome this barrier, one idea is to build computational models of student learning and use them to optimize instructional materials. However, it is difficult to model the cognitive processes of learning dynamics. We propose an alternative approach that uses Language Models (LMs) as educational experts to assess the impact of various instructions on learning outcomes. Specifically, we use GPT-3.5 to evaluate the overall effect of instructional materials on different student groups and find that it can replicate well-established educational findings such as the Expertise Reversal Effect and the Variability Effect. This demonstrates the potential of LMs as reliable evaluators of educational content. Building on this insight, we introduce an instruction optimization approach in which one LM generates instructional materials using the judgments of another LM as a reward function. We apply this approach to create math word problem worksheets aimed at maximizing student learning gains. Human teachers' evaluations of these LM-generated worksheets show a significant alignment between the LM judgments and human teacher preferences. We conclude by discussing potential divergences between human and LM opinions and the resulting pitfalls of automating instructional design.
title Evaluating and Optimizing Educational Content with Large Language Model Judgments
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02795