When a problem admits multiple valid solutions, effective tutoring requires building on a student's strategy while introducing alternatives at appropriate points. However, whether LLM tutors can support this flexibility by appropriately responding to students' diverse solution approaches remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce MUSE: Multi-solution Understanding and Simulation Environment, a controlled environment for simulating student-tutor conversations on multiple-solution programming problems. Grounded in learning science on responsive instruction and multiple-solution learning, we investigate which solutions LLM tutors prefer, how they respond to students' approaches, and how they transition between solutions. Experiments suggest that LLM tutors exhibit systematic preferences among valid solutions, often favoring brute-force approaches when not providing general advice. More concerningly, tutors often impose these preferences, redirecting students toward their own preferred approach rather than supporting the student's. Yet this tendency reverses once a solution is completed: tutors often remain anchored to the existing approach when a stronger alternative could deepen understanding, and sometimes even transition to a less optimal approach. Thus, tutors struggle both to build on students' reasoning when appropriate and to extend their reasoning when beneficial. Promisingly, targeted post-training improves both tutor responsiveness and transitions toward more optimal solutions.
Xinghe Chen OpenStax, Naiming Liu, Shashank Sonkar University of Central Florida
Student mistakes in mathematics are often systematic: a learner applies a coherent but wrong procedure and repeats it across contexts. We introduce MalruleLib, a learning-science-grounded framework that translates documented misconceptions into executable procedures, drawing on 67 learning-science and mathematics education sources, and generates step-by-step traces of malrule-consistent student work. We formalize a core student-modeling problem as Malrule Reasoning Accuracy (MRA): infer a misconception from one worked mistake and predict the student’s next answer under cross-template rephrasing. Across nine language models (4B - 120B), accuracy drops from 66% on direct problem solving to 40% on cross-template misconception prediction. MalruleLib encodes 101 malrules over 498 parameterized problem templates and produces paired dual-path traces for both correct reasoning and malrule-consistent student reasoning. Because malrules are executable and templates are parameterizable, MalruleLib can generate over one million instances, enabling scalable supervision and controlled evaluation. Using MalruleLib, we observe cross-template degradations of 10 - 21%, while providing student step traces improves prediction by 3 - 15%. We release MalruleLib as infrastructure for educational AI that models student procedures across contexts, enabling diagnosis and feedback that targets the underlying misconception.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表