LLMs are Biased Teachers: Evaluating LLM Bias in Personalized Education

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Weissburg, Iain, Anand, Sathvika, Levy, Sharon, Jeong, Haewon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Weissburg, Iain
Anand, Sathvika
Levy, Sharon
Jeong, Haewon
author_facet Weissburg, Iain
Anand, Sathvika
Levy, Sharon
Jeong, Haewon
contents With the increasing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in education, concerns about inherent biases in these models have gained prominence. We evaluate LLMs for bias in the personalized educational setting, specifically focusing on the models' roles as "teachers." We reveal significant biases in how models generate and select educational content tailored to different demographic groups, including race, ethnicity, sex, gender, disability status, income, and national origin. We introduce and apply two bias score metrics--Mean Absolute Bias (MAB) and Maximum Difference Bias (MDB)--to analyze 9 open and closed state-of-the-art LLMs. Our experiments, which utilize over 17,000 educational explanations across multiple difficulty levels and topics, uncover that models potentially harm student learning by both perpetuating harmful stereotypes and reversing them. We find that bias is similar for all frontier models, with the highest MAB along income levels while MDB is highest relative to both income and disability status. For both metrics, we find the lowest bias exists for sex/gender and race/ethnicity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_14012
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLMs are Biased Teachers: Evaluating LLM Bias in Personalized Education
Weissburg, Iain
Anand, Sathvika
Levy, Sharon
Jeong, Haewon
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
With the increasing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in education, concerns about inherent biases in these models have gained prominence. We evaluate LLMs for bias in the personalized educational setting, specifically focusing on the models' roles as "teachers." We reveal significant biases in how models generate and select educational content tailored to different demographic groups, including race, ethnicity, sex, gender, disability status, income, and national origin. We introduce and apply two bias score metrics--Mean Absolute Bias (MAB) and Maximum Difference Bias (MDB)--to analyze 9 open and closed state-of-the-art LLMs. Our experiments, which utilize over 17,000 educational explanations across multiple difficulty levels and topics, uncover that models potentially harm student learning by both perpetuating harmful stereotypes and reversing them. We find that bias is similar for all frontier models, with the highest MAB along income levels while MDB is highest relative to both income and disability status. For both metrics, we find the lowest bias exists for sex/gender and race/ethnicity.
title LLMs are Biased Teachers: Evaluating LLM Bias in Personalized Education
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14012