When LLMs Learn to be Students: The SOEI Framework for Modeling and Evaluating Virtual Student Agents in Educational Interaction
This work addresses the need for principled personality modeling and scalable evaluation of virtual student agents in teacher-facing educational applications, representing an incremental advance in AI for education.
The paper tackles the problem of developing and evaluating LLM-based Virtual Student Agents (LVSAs) for educational interactions by proposing the SOEI framework, which generates personality-aligned agents and demonstrates through experiments with pre-service teachers that they can elicit adaptive teaching strategies and maintain trait-consistent behavior.
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled intelligent tutoring systems, yet the development of LLM-based Virtual Student Agents (LVSAs) remains underexplored. Such agents are essential for teacher-facing applications, where simulating diverse learner traits can support adaptive instruction and pedagogical skill development. However, current methods lack principled personality modeling, scalable evaluation of behavioral consistency, and empirical validation in interactive teaching settings. We propose the SOEI framework, a structured pipeline comprising Scene, Object, Evaluation, and Interaction, for constructing and evaluating personality-aligned LVSAs in classroom scenarios. Leveraging Chinese language instruction as a cognitively and emotionally rich testbed, we generate five LVSAs based on Big Five traits through LoRA fine-tuning and expert-informed prompt design. Their behavioral realism and personality coherence are assessed using a hybrid human & GPT-4 evaluation and a multi-dimensional annotation protocol. Through controlled experiments with real pre-service teachers, we demonstrate that LVSAs can elicit adaptive teaching strategies and maintain trait-consistent behavior across multi-turn dialogues. Our results provide: (1) an educationally and psychologically grounded generation pipeline for LLM-based student agents; (2) a hybrid, scalable evaluation framework for behavioral realism; and (3) empirical insights into the pedagogical utility of LVSAs in shaping instructional adaptation. By embedding LVSAs into both generative modeling and human-in-the-loop teaching, SOEI bridges AI for Education (AI4Edu) and Education for AI (Edu4AI), positioning classroom interaction as a rigorous testbed for controllability, personality alignment, and human-likeness in large language models.