Yasemin Copur-Gencturk

Yucheng Chu, Haoyu Han, Shen Dong et al.

Automated short answer grading (ASAG) is critical for scaling educational assessment, yet large language models (LLMs) often struggle with hallucinations and strict rubric adherence due to their reliance on generalized pre-training. While Rretrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these issues, standard "flat" vector retrieval mechanisms treat knowledge as isolated fragments, failing to capture the structural relationships and multi-hop reasoning essential for complex educational content. To address this limitation, we introduce a Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) framework that organizes reference materials into a structured knowledge graph to explicitly model dependencies between concepts. Our methodology employs a dual-phase pipeline: utilizing Microsoft GraphRAG for high-fidelity graph construction and the HippoRAG neurosymbolic algorithm to execute associative graph traversals, thereby retrieving comprehensive, connected subgraphs of evidence. Experimental evaluations on a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) dataset demonstrate that this structural approach significantly outperforms standard RAG baselines across all metrics. Notably, the HippoRAG implementation achieved substantial improvements in evaluating Science and Engineering Practices (SEP), confirming the superiority of structural retrieval in verifying the logical reasoning chains required for higher-order academic assessment.

Hang Li, Kaiqi Yang, Xianxuan Long et al.

The rapid rise of large language models (LLMs) is reshaping the landscape of automatic assessment in education. While these systems demonstrate substantial advantages in adaptability to diverse question types and flexibility in output formats, they also introduce new challenges related to output uncertainty, stemming from the inherently probabilistic nature of LLMs. Output uncertainty is an inescapable challenge in automatic assessment, as assessment results often play a critical role in informing subsequent pedagogical actions, such as providing feedback to students or guiding instructional decisions. Unreliable or poorly calibrated uncertainty estimates can lead to unstable downstream interventions, potentially disrupting students' learning processes and resulting in unintended negative consequences. To systematically understand this challenge and inform future research, we benchmark a broad range of uncertainty quantification methods in the context of LLM-based automatic assessment. Although the effectiveness of these methods has been demonstrated in many tasks across other domains, their applicability and reliability in educational settings, particularly for automatic grading, remain underexplored. Through comprehensive analyses of uncertainty behaviors across multiple assessment datasets, LLM families, and generation control settings, we characterize the uncertainty patterns exhibited by LLMs in grading scenarios. Based on these findings, we evaluate the strengths and limitations of different uncertainty metrics and analyze the influence of key factors, including model families, assessment tasks, and decoding strategies, on uncertainty estimates. Our study provides actionable insights into the characteristics of uncertainty in LLM-based automatic assessment and lays the groundwork for developing more reliable and effective uncertainty-aware grading systems in the future.

Kaiqi Yang, Yucheng Chu, Taylor Darwin et al.

Teachers' mathematical content knowledge (CK) is of vital importance and need in teacher professional development (PD) programs. Computer-aided asynchronous PD systems are the most recent proposed PD techniques, which aim to help teachers improve their PD equally with fewer concerns about costs and limitations of time or location. However, current automatic CK identification methods, which serve as one of the core techniques of asynchronous PD systems, face challenges such as diversity of user responses, scarcity of high-quality annotated data, and low interpretability of the predictions. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Multi-Agent LLMs-based framework, LLMAgent-CK, to assess the user responses' coverage of identified CK learning goals without human annotations. By taking advantage of multi-agent LLMs in strong generalization ability and human-like discussions, our proposed LLMAgent-CK presents promising CK identifying performance on a real-world mathematical CK dataset MaCKT. Moreover, our case studies further demonstrate the working of the multi-agent framework.

Hang Li, Yucheng Chu, Kaiqi Yang et al.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, particularly large language models (LLMs), has brought significant advancements to the field of education. Among various applications, automatic short answer grading (ASAG), which focuses on evaluating open-ended textual responses, has seen remarkable progress with the introduction of LLMs. These models not only enhance grading performance compared to traditional ASAG approaches but also move beyond simple comparisons with predefined "golden" answers, enabling more sophisticated grading scenarios, such as rubric-based evaluation. However, existing LLM-powered methods still face challenges in achieving human-level grading performance in rubric-based assessments due to their reliance on fully automated approaches. In this work, we explore the potential of LLMs in ASAG tasks by leveraging their interactive capabilities through a human-in-the-loop (HITL) approach. Our proposed framework, GradeHITL, utilizes the generative properties of LLMs to pose questions to human experts, incorporating their insights to refine grading rubrics dynamically. This adaptive process significantly improves grading accuracy, outperforming existing methods and bringing ASAG closer to human-level evaluation.