Songhee Han

Songhee Han

Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) in education often portray teaching as a modular and procedural job that can increasingly be automated or delegated to technology. This brief communication paper argues that such claims depend on treating teaching as more separable than it is in practice. Drawing on recent literature and empirical studies of large language models and retrieval-augmented generation systems, I argue that although AI can support some bounded functions, instructional work remains difficult to automate in meaningful ways because it is inherently interpretive, relational, and grounded in professional judgment. More fundamentally, teaching and learning are shaped by human cognition, behavior, motivation, and social interaction in ways that cannot be fully specified, predicted, or exhaustively modeled. Tasks that may appear separable in principle derive their instructional value in practice from ongoing contextual interpretation across learners, situations, and relationships. As long as educational practice relies on emergent understanding of human cognition and learning, teaching remains a form of professional work that resists automation. AI may improve access to information and support selected instructional activities, but it does not remove the need for human judgment and relational accountability that effective teaching requires.

Songhee Han, Jueun Shin, Jiyoon Han et al.

As qualitative researchers show growing interest in using automated tools to support interpretive analysis, a large language model (LLM) is often introduced into an analytic workflow as is, without systematic evaluation of interpretive quality or comparison across models. This practice leaves model selection largely unexamined despite its potential influence on interpretive outcomes. To address this gap, this study examines whether LLM-as-judge evaluations meaningfully align with human judgments of interpretive quality and can inform model-level decision making. Using 712 conversational excerpts from semi-structured interviews with K-12 mathematics teachers, we generated one-sentence interpretive responses using five widely adopted inference models: Command R+ (Cohere), Gemini 2.5 Pro (Google), GPT-5.1 (OpenAI), Llama 4 Scout-17B Instruct (Meta), and Qwen 3-32B Dense (Alibaba). Automated evaluations were conducted using AWS Bedrock's LLM-as-judge framework across five metrics, and a stratified subset of responses was independently rated by trained human evaluators on interpretive accuracy, nuance preservation, and interpretive coherence. Results show that LLM-as-judge scores capture broad directional trends in human evaluations at the model level but diverge substantially in score magnitude. Among automated metrics, Coherence showed the strongest alignment with aggregated human ratings, whereas Faithfulness and Correctness revealed systematic misalignment at the excerpt level, particularly for non-literal and nuanced interpretations. Safety-related metrics were largely irrelevant to interpretive quality. These findings suggest that LLM-as-judge methods are better suited for screening or eliminating underperforming models than for replacing human judgment, offering practical guidance for systematic comparison and selection of LLMs in qualitative research workflows.