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Autori principali: Fox, Danielle S., Robles, Brenda L., Brovey, Elizabeth DiPietro, Schunn, Christian D.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30151
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author Fox, Danielle S.
Robles, Brenda L.
Brovey, Elizabeth DiPietro
Schunn, Christian D.
author_facet Fox, Danielle S.
Robles, Brenda L.
Brovey, Elizabeth DiPietro
Schunn, Christian D.
contents As AI tools become increasingly integrated into educational contexts, questions arise about both their stability over time and their responsiveness to prompt engineering techniques. This longitudinal study focused on different AI tools' ability to use the Task Analysis Guide (TAG; Stein \& Smith, 1998) to classify the cognitive demand of mathematics tasks. In particular, it examined whether this classification ability changed with (1) model version updates over time and (2) few-shot prompting using exemplar tasks. We tested a general-purpose AI tool (Gemini) and an education-specific AI tool (Coteach). The specific tools were selected because of their relatively high performance on relevant published benchmarks and prior task-specific tests. Models were tested at baseline, retested with model version updates, and then tested again using few-shot prompting (two exemplar tasks for each cognitive demand category). Results revealed that newer model versions alone produced mixed effects: Gemini's accuracy remained stable at 58\%, while Coteach's accuracy decreased from 75\% to 50\%. However, few-shot prompting improved both models' performance: Gemini increased to 67\% and Coteach recovered to 75\% accuracy. These findings demonstrate that prompt engineering techniques can have larger and more reliable effects than passive model improvements, and that version updates may not always improve performance on specialized educational tasks. The study has important implications for how educators and researchers should approach AI tool selection, evaluation, and implementation in educational contexts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_30151
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Temporal Stability and Few-Shot Prompting in Math Task Assessment
Fox, Danielle S.
Robles, Brenda L.
Brovey, Elizabeth DiPietro
Schunn, Christian D.
Artificial Intelligence
As AI tools become increasingly integrated into educational contexts, questions arise about both their stability over time and their responsiveness to prompt engineering techniques. This longitudinal study focused on different AI tools' ability to use the Task Analysis Guide (TAG; Stein \& Smith, 1998) to classify the cognitive demand of mathematics tasks. In particular, it examined whether this classification ability changed with (1) model version updates over time and (2) few-shot prompting using exemplar tasks. We tested a general-purpose AI tool (Gemini) and an education-specific AI tool (Coteach). The specific tools were selected because of their relatively high performance on relevant published benchmarks and prior task-specific tests. Models were tested at baseline, retested with model version updates, and then tested again using few-shot prompting (two exemplar tasks for each cognitive demand category). Results revealed that newer model versions alone produced mixed effects: Gemini's accuracy remained stable at 58\%, while Coteach's accuracy decreased from 75\% to 50\%. However, few-shot prompting improved both models' performance: Gemini increased to 67\% and Coteach recovered to 75\% accuracy. These findings demonstrate that prompt engineering techniques can have larger and more reliable effects than passive model improvements, and that version updates may not always improve performance on specialized educational tasks. The study has important implications for how educators and researchers should approach AI tool selection, evaluation, and implementation in educational contexts.
title Temporal Stability and Few-Shot Prompting in Math Task Assessment
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30151