K12-KGraph: A Curriculum-Aligned Knowledge Graph for Benchmarking and Training Educational LLMs

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Main Authors: Liang, Hao, Lin, Qihan, Han, Zhaoyang, Ma, Xiaochen, Wong, Zhen Hao, Qiang, Meiyi, Sun, Linzhuang, Zhang, Wentao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Liang, Hao
Lin, Qihan
Han, Zhaoyang
Ma, Xiaochen
Wong, Zhen Hao
Qiang, Meiyi
Sun, Linzhuang
Zhang, Wentao
author_facet Liang, Hao
Lin, Qihan
Han, Zhaoyang
Ma, Xiaochen
Wong, Zhen Hao
Qiang, Meiyi
Sun, Linzhuang
Zhang, Wentao
contents Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in K-12 education, yet existing benchmarks such as C-Eval, CMMLU, GaokaoBench, and EduEval mainly evaluate factual recall through exam-style question answering. Effective educational AI additionally requires curriculum cognition: understanding how knowledge is structured through prerequisite chains, concept taxonomies, experiment-concept links, and pedagogical sequencing. To address this gap, we introduce K12-KGraph, a curriculum-aligned knowledge graph extracted from official People's Education Press textbooks across mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology from primary to high school. The graph contains seven node types (Concept, Skill, Experiment, Exercise, Section, Chapter, Book) and nine relation types covering taxonomy, prerequisite, association, verification, assessment, location, and order. Based on this graph, we construct two resources: (1) K12-Bench, a 23,640-question multi-select benchmark spanning five graph-derived task families (Ground, Prereq, Neighbor, Evidence, and Locate); and (2) K12-Train, a KG-guided supervised fine-tuning corpus of approximately 2,300 QA pairs synthesized from graph structure and node attributes. Experiments reveal substantial deficiencies in curriculum cognition: on K12-Bench, Gemini-3-Flash achieves only 57% exact match, while the best open-source model, Gemma-4-31B-IT, reaches 46%. Under a strictly matched 2,300-sample SFT budget on Qwen3-4B-Base and Llama-3.1-8B-Base, K12-Train consistently outperforms equally sized subsets from eight mainstream instruction-tuning corpora on both GaokaoBench and EduEval, demonstrating that curriculum-structured supervision is highly sample-efficient for educational tuning. We release the graph, benchmark, training data, and full construction pipeline.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_09635
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle K12-KGraph: A Curriculum-Aligned Knowledge Graph for Benchmarking and Training Educational LLMs
Liang, Hao
Lin, Qihan
Han, Zhaoyang
Ma, Xiaochen
Wong, Zhen Hao
Qiang, Meiyi
Sun, Linzhuang
Zhang, Wentao
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in K-12 education, yet existing benchmarks such as C-Eval, CMMLU, GaokaoBench, and EduEval mainly evaluate factual recall through exam-style question answering. Effective educational AI additionally requires curriculum cognition: understanding how knowledge is structured through prerequisite chains, concept taxonomies, experiment-concept links, and pedagogical sequencing. To address this gap, we introduce K12-KGraph, a curriculum-aligned knowledge graph extracted from official People's Education Press textbooks across mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology from primary to high school. The graph contains seven node types (Concept, Skill, Experiment, Exercise, Section, Chapter, Book) and nine relation types covering taxonomy, prerequisite, association, verification, assessment, location, and order. Based on this graph, we construct two resources: (1) K12-Bench, a 23,640-question multi-select benchmark spanning five graph-derived task families (Ground, Prereq, Neighbor, Evidence, and Locate); and (2) K12-Train, a KG-guided supervised fine-tuning corpus of approximately 2,300 QA pairs synthesized from graph structure and node attributes. Experiments reveal substantial deficiencies in curriculum cognition: on K12-Bench, Gemini-3-Flash achieves only 57% exact match, while the best open-source model, Gemma-4-31B-IT, reaches 46%. Under a strictly matched 2,300-sample SFT budget on Qwen3-4B-Base and Llama-3.1-8B-Base, K12-Train consistently outperforms equally sized subsets from eight mainstream instruction-tuning corpora on both GaokaoBench and EduEval, demonstrating that curriculum-structured supervision is highly sample-efficient for educational tuning. We release the graph, benchmark, training data, and full construction pipeline.
title K12-KGraph: A Curriculum-Aligned Knowledge Graph for Benchmarking and Training Educational LLMs
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09635