AI Knows Best? The Paradox of Expertise, AI-Reliance, and Performance in Educational Tutoring Decision-Making Tasks

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chen, Eason, Li, Jeffrey, Huang, Scarlett, Tang, Xinyi, Lin, Jionghao, Carvalho, Paulo, Koedinger, Kenneth
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914232263507968
author Chen, Eason
Li, Jeffrey
Huang, Scarlett
Tang, Xinyi
Lin, Jionghao
Carvalho, Paulo
Koedinger, Kenneth
author_facet Chen, Eason
Li, Jeffrey
Huang, Scarlett
Tang, Xinyi
Lin, Jionghao
Carvalho, Paulo
Koedinger, Kenneth
contents We present an empirical study of how both experienced tutors and non-tutors judge the correctness of tutor praise responses under different Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted interfaces, types of explanation (textual explanations vs. inline highlighting). We first fine-tuned several Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce binary correctness labels and explanations, achieving up to 88% accuracy and 0.92 F1 score with GPT-4. We then let the GPT-4 models assist 95 participants in tutoring decision-making tasks by offering different types of explanations. Our findings show that although human-AI collaboration outperforms humans alone in evaluating tutor responses, it remains less accurate than AI alone. Moreover, we find that non-tutors tend to follow the AI's advice more consistently, which boosts their overall accuracy on the task: especially when the AI is correct. In contrast, experienced tutors often override the AI's correct suggestions and thus miss out on potential gains from the AI's generally high baseline accuracy. Further analysis reveals that explanations in text reasoning will increase over-reliance and reduce underreliance, while inline highlighting does not. Moreover, neither explanation style actually has a significant effect on performance and costs participants more time to complete the task, instead of saving time. Our findings reveal a tension between expertise, explanation design, and efficiency in AI-assisted decision-making, highlighting the need for balanced approaches that foster more effective human-AI collaboration.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_16772
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AI Knows Best? The Paradox of Expertise, AI-Reliance, and Performance in Educational Tutoring Decision-Making Tasks
Chen, Eason
Li, Jeffrey
Huang, Scarlett
Tang, Xinyi
Lin, Jionghao
Carvalho, Paulo
Koedinger, Kenneth
Human-Computer Interaction
We present an empirical study of how both experienced tutors and non-tutors judge the correctness of tutor praise responses under different Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted interfaces, types of explanation (textual explanations vs. inline highlighting). We first fine-tuned several Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce binary correctness labels and explanations, achieving up to 88% accuracy and 0.92 F1 score with GPT-4. We then let the GPT-4 models assist 95 participants in tutoring decision-making tasks by offering different types of explanations. Our findings show that although human-AI collaboration outperforms humans alone in evaluating tutor responses, it remains less accurate than AI alone. Moreover, we find that non-tutors tend to follow the AI's advice more consistently, which boosts their overall accuracy on the task: especially when the AI is correct. In contrast, experienced tutors often override the AI's correct suggestions and thus miss out on potential gains from the AI's generally high baseline accuracy. Further analysis reveals that explanations in text reasoning will increase over-reliance and reduce underreliance, while inline highlighting does not. Moreover, neither explanation style actually has a significant effect on performance and costs participants more time to complete the task, instead of saving time. Our findings reveal a tension between expertise, explanation design, and efficiency in AI-assisted decision-making, highlighting the need for balanced approaches that foster more effective human-AI collaboration.
title AI Knows Best? The Paradox of Expertise, AI-Reliance, and Performance in Educational Tutoring Decision-Making Tasks
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16772